knoxville is a gritty, hard-working sort of town and it seems like a fine place to begin my journey. knoxville is a long way from richmond, so i didn’t get to the hostel (which may be the only hostel in the state of tennessee) after dark. what i saw of the state from I-40 looked appealing: rolling hills, distant mountains and mysterious forests. i obviously needed a beer.
rolling into knoxville, it looks like a semi-industrial town with some small-town character. there’s some construction going on and it looks like expansion and revitalization. good. i’m still wondering where my beer is.
the gentleman who admitted me and took my $17 talked like he was 60, moved like he was 70 and smelled like he was 80. he was as gracious and kind as he could have been, though, and gave me a map of the ‘old city’ and recommendations on where to go. we discussed food and drink and and managed to quickly agree a beer was in my near future.
i wandered around downtown and, unable to follow his silly, incoherent directions, ended up in a coffee shop. they didn’t have beer, so i enjoyed the hell out of a hot chocolate. i couldn’t find anything else going on so i surrendered and called it a night. the only thing left was to decide whether it was worth it to stick around for much time during the day.
i’m about 30 minutes from grand smokey national forest, one of the most famous national parks in the united states. i wanted to do some camping and hiking on this trip and i can’t imagine i’m going to get a much better site than this (besides the grand canyon). so i’ll be staying another day and doing some hiking, bear-hunting, and camping.
i hope the park has beer.
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