The Blue Ridge Mountains run along I-81 through the western part of Virginia. Seeing them in the distance is breathtaking, but it’s really difficult to capture a mountain range in a single photograph. It’s something that’s better suited for video, which I’ll have to post once we arrive in Los Angeles in two weeks.

Conveniently placed between Washington, D.C. and Knoxville is the small town of Lexington, Virginia. Here, Washington & Lee University is located along with the graves of Civil War generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, both Confederates. Jackson owned a single home in his lifetime while he taught at the local Virginia Military Institute and it’s now a museum. Lee became the president of Washington College (later renamed Washington & Lee University) following his defeat in the Civil War and remained in that position until his death. He’s buried at the adjacent Lee Chapel, which contains a museum in the basement.

Since we arrived at 5 PM on a Sunday, the Lee Chapel & Museum was just closing. However, we were able to photograph the outsides of the small chapel and campus and stopped by Stonewall Jackson’s grave site. Before leaving this quaint little town, we grabbed a snack from the local Wendy’s and continued to drive to Knoxville.

It was dark by the time we arrived at the Tennessee state border, so the photos are more like shadows in front of the state signs. But we may try to capture a different Tennessee state sign on the way out of the state when we leave Memphis for Little Rock, Arkansas.

The first thing I noticed in Knoxville is that people are super polite, which matches their very thick southern accents. Up to this point, none of the locals have had strong accents. The second this I realized is that a lot of restaurants are closed on a Sunday night despite the metropolitan-looking city. For example, we had originally planned on ordering Smothered Burgers and Jumbo Tater Skins at the Downtown Grill & Brewery based on gushingly-positive Yelp! reviews. And, their website said that they’re open until “midnight on Sundays (or later based on business).” But when double-checking on the phone, the guy said that they weren’t serving food past 10 PM.

Instead, we settled for IHOP and had the concierge call us a cab. When the cab took more than five minutes to arrive, the concierge politely walked out of the hotel to where we were sitting and waiting to apologize and tell us that it’d be here two minutes. Clearly there weren’t many (or any) guests to attend to at this time on night, but if the cab was coming is 120 seconds (which it did), it wasn’t imperative to tell us. Yet, he was gracious enough to give us the heads up when a lot of other places might have left us waiting and wondering.

Tomorrow we’re going to check out the outside of the towering gold-colored glass Sunsphere before we leave for Memphis. We purposely booked the Holiday Inn next to this symbol of the 1982 World’s Fair because it appeared in a an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart, Milhouse, Nelson and Martin all go on a roadtrip. After reading an outdated AAA guidebook, they’re hyped about the seeing the Sunsphere in person, rejecting the idea of Disneyworld in favor of the World’s Fair, not knowing it occurred 14 years prior to the 1996 episode.

They disappointingly discover that the Sunsphere has been rebranded the Wigsphere, full of wigs for sale, and that they’re out of money, as Martin just spent their last $10 on a talking Al Gore doll (also from Tennessee). Out of anger, Nelson throws a rock at the “Stupid Sphere,” which subsequently falls over onto their illegally-rented car and, from there, the gang’s problems only get worse.

The Sunsphere isn’t full of wigs (and the hotel clerk didn’t get the joke when I nonchalantly asked if it was), but it does seem a little forgotten. The locals didn’t know when or if the observation deck was still open (some said it was open at 9 AM, others thought 10 AM, and one person said it wasn’t accessible anymore), so we decided against waiting around tomorrow. After all, the Sunsphere is the best part of the skyline, so viewing the rest of the city from the 341-foot tower would take away the most iconic structure. The exterior is where it’s at! …or so we convinced our time-conscious brains.

I’ll post our Sunsphere photo here tomorrow: