We left Nashville yesterday morning and headed east towards the Smoky Mountains. After a homely lunch at a chain of restaurants called Cracker Barrel we stopped in at Knoxville to visit my friend Susan who I met online doing internet projects between our classes back in 1995. The only time we met face to face was when we came over here in 1998 or 99 when we were on a busy trip that stopped in Phoenix, Arizona. She's retired since then and she and her late husband...

We enjoyed our night at the Opry and saw 12 artists perform in a 2-hour program. While we didn't really know the names of any of them, the music was good and some of the ones that we enjoyed were Riders in the Sky who were a band of 4 and did a great rendition of Rawhide, Kalisa Ewing, Chaley Rose who sang 2 beautiful songs and The Willis Clan who are 6 (of 12) siblings who sing and play a variety of instruments. Today we drove to see Antique Archaeology that fe...

Yesterday we left Laurel and continued to drive north in our sleek, black Nissan Altima. Actually we stopped at Walmart in Laurel first and bought a few new clothes as well as an esky and some supplies. We stopped for lunch at the tourist rest area as we crossed the state line into Alabama and picked up a few brochures. We decided to visit Barber Motorsports Museum on the outskirts of Birmingham. It houses five floors of displays, mainly motorbikes but also Lotu...

This morning we had breakfast with the hundreds of others on the cruise and queued again to get cruise registration finished - incredibly slow and lacking good organisation! We boarded our bus for a tour of the city and then the drive out to Graceland. After more queuing.....we're sick of this already, we got on the buses that shuttled us over to the mansion and began our audio tour. It was lovely to see the various rooms that we'd heard about and see Elvis' var...

We got into Memphis late last night but unfortunately our bags decided to stay in Houston! Oh well, that means we'll do some shopping courtesy of United Airlines! At least our hotel was expecting us and the bed was comfortable! At breakfast we discovered a few people here already who are going on the same cruise as us. We got talking and decided to join a half day city tour which took in the Peabody Ducks, the hotel where Martin Luther King was shot, a drive pas...