Kentucky, anyone? How about Tennessee?
With only 411 miles to cover today, I waved goodbye to the Land of Lincoln with Journey's Wheel in the Sky playing on the local oldies radio station. (May I just pause here to ask, "How, for the love of all that's holy, did enough time pass for Journey songs come to be considered "oldies"?)
I crossed the Ohio River and entered Paducah, Kentucky where I saw a billboard advertising the National Quilt Museum. I decided to stop.
You know how on Sesame Street each episode is brought to you by a number and a letter ("Today's episode is brought to you by the letter J and the number 8.")? The National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky is brought to you by the word, "Wow." Inadequate as it was, I said that word over and over as I spent an hour in awe of the amazing talent displayed by the quilters. Although it is against the rules to take photos of the quilts (something about intellectual property rights, blah, blah, blah - a bunch of hooey, especially because images of the quilts were being sold as postcards in the gift shop), I took a few:
I continued on my way down the interstate and crossed the Tennessee River. Then the Cumberland, then Lake Barkley and Stones River near Nashville. Then I crossed the Caney Fork River five times in the space of less than two miles. Then the Falling Water River, the Obed River and the Clinch River. Captain Obvious: Kentucky and Tennessee have a lot of rivers.
Outside of Nashville, traffic came to an abrupt halt. A heavy rainstorm had just passed over and it was still drizzling. Over the course of the next hour, I covered 10 miles, inch by inch. I grabbed my phone after about 15 minutes and looked up road conditions on I-40 eastbound and discovered there had been an accident around milepost 252. Sure enough, when I got to the accident site, a huge motor home was turned over along the side of the road, a damaged truck beside it. By my calculations, I would have been pretty close to that spot at the time of the accident if I hadn't stopped to ogle the quilts back in Paducah.
The upside is that, while stalled in traffic, I was listening to Jim Gaffigan's Dad is Fat on my iPod that I had synced with the car sound system. Hysterical. I'm sure the other drivers in the gridlock must have thought I had just been released from Bellevue, if they chanced to look in my direction and saw me cracking up for no apparent reason.
I'm spending the night in Knoxville, and looking forward to a short day (only 259 miles!) tomorrow, when I arrive in Virginia.
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