Last Day in Franklin

When we went to bed last night, we were planning to spend the day in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, which we've barely touched on this trip, despite our telling many people that we were vacationing in the "Smokies", since it's the most recognizable name in the area. But when we woke up -- or perhaps more accurately, when we didn't want to wake up, we decided to have a crash day in Franklin, letting Sarah have fun and us recharge our batteries for the two days of hard driving home.

So we began with lunch, at Willy's Barbecue just down the hill from our hotel, then went to Fun Factory in the Smokies, where Sarah played laser tag, rode bumper cars and spent most of the afternoon at one single arcade game throwing balls into targets. Sort of a Chuck E. Cheese on steroids, and my first exposure to laser tag (Tam had taken her to a laser tag place before at home). She got the usual cheap junk as prizes and declared it "awesome." (An aside: I noticed that the link I just posted to their website had a .bz extension. I didn't recognize this, wondered if the Byzantine Empire had a country code extension, but learned on googling that it's Belize. Since I'm pretty sure the Fun Factory in the Smokies is not in Belize, I googled some more, and I guess somebody was making money selling Belize domain names on the claim that .bz could stand for "business," much the way Tuvalu was marketing its .tv extension for televsion shows etc. (Though probably a few more people could tell you where Belize is than Tuvalu.) Anyway on reflection I had to feel sorry for the folks in Bermuda and the Bahamas, who despite their tourist attractions will find it much harder to sell domains ending in .bm and .bs.)

After that we went to beautiful downtown Franklin -- and I do mean beautiful, the end of the short stretch of Main Street that can be called "downtown" is on a hilltop looking out over spectacular mountain scenery -- where I visited the nice local bookstore, Tam visited a kitchen supply store (buying stuff in fact that she claims she can't find in Washington), and Sarah and I visited Ruby City Gems, where Sarah added to her rock collection. As I've already noted, Franklin is a center for gem mining.

Then, being nearly a week into the vacation, we had to go to a laundromat to wash a launcry so we'd have clean clothes, and while the laundry was washing, we went to a Wal-Mart and bought some new DVDs for the ride back. We plan to go back via the Tri-Cities of NE Tennessee to Roanoke, using Interstate 26 which we haven't used before. The rough map is here. We usually foreswear Interstates but need to get to Roanoke tomorrow night so will have to use some. Maybe from Roanoke we can go back older roads. Anyway it seemed like a good idea to have some new DVDs to give Sarah a distraction for long drives; the ones we brought with us were entirely used on the way down. Sarah also went with Tam to a cosmetic store, her idea of fun. Once the laundry was done we had a last ice cream at Sprinkles, down the hill from our hotel, went to dinner and are now getting ready for bed on our last night here.