Day 3 - Faux Fight at Franklin at DennyGibson.com

Day 3: November 17, 2014
A Sad Sight on the Dixie
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It was no longer raining when I woke up this morning but that's mostly because it was now snowing. Not much. Not nearly as much as was falling back home in Cincinnati but enough. And it was cold.

The Loveless Cafe is always on my "maybe list" anytime I'm in the Nashville area and it became a "for sure" the instant I realized the cafe was almost exactly ten miles due west of my motel. It's a great place to recover from having a battle pulled out from under you. There are no identifying markings on the cafe itself but there's a nice neon sign out front which I captured on my first visit in 2006. I got a night time shot on the same visit. I'm ashamed to admit how many of those famous biscuits I ate with my breakfast but I will tell you that my appetite had been satisfied by the time I took the picture of them being made. I was pleasantly surprised to see these Blink Network chargers next to the cafe. An internet search shows they were installed in the summer of 2011. Seems I just failed to notice them on my most recent visit in April, 2013.

Most of Saturday's travel had been on expressways and I couldn't bring myself to head home that way. I followed TN-100 back into Nashville then headed north on US-31W. I've driven this road before but this was the first time I've noticed this bridge just south of where US-31W and US-41 split. As others have done, I took some pictures of the bridge on private property from a distance. A nearby sign describes the bridge as being used by stagecoaches between Nashville and Louisville until the railroad was completed in 1859. Brigehunter reports the bridge being built some time between 1837 and 1849 as part of the Louisville and Nashville Turnpike.

I continued on US-31W through Bowling Green where it begins following, more or less, the path of the Dixie Highway. I knew of the fire at the Horseshoe Camp Cabins so wasn't surprised but seeing the damage brought back the sadness and anger. Both were made worse by the fact that, after years of seeing the place slowly deteriorate, I found a new roof over the office area on a 2013 stop. The fire, which occurred barely a year after that visit, was apparently triggered by a meth lab in one of the cabins. A newspaper report on the fire includes the information that a person was apprehended at the site on the day of the fire but my search skills weren't good enough to turn up any more recent news.

The Swope Auto Museum sit's right beside US-31W/Dixie Highway in Elizabethtown, has a bunch of beautiful cars, and is free. This was my second visit and, getting there just fifteen minutes before closing, it was a quick one. I didn't even realize that the place had been remodeled and enlarged until I got home and looked at some pictures from my 2010 visit. I included a 1935 Ford in those 2010 pictures because it was similar to the oldest car I'd ever driven. I can also claim to have driven something similar to this Jaguar XK 120 sitting just inside the entrance. The one I drove right at fifty years ago, courtesy of a high school classmate, was no where near as pristine as this beauty but driving it was really cool.

The big yellow taxi in the next picture is a 1914 Renault followed by a 1936 Chrysler Airflow and a 1948 Chrysler New Yorker. The New Yorker finished second in the 1998 Great Race Across America. Yeah, I could handle driving across the country in this. I took the self captioned picture of the Swope brothers as I slipped out the soon to be locked front door.

Dinner was a fried bologna sandwich at Cumberland Brews in Louisville. That's their Oktoberfest pictured and I also tried the Hochlander. All three (beer, beer, baloney) were quite good. I'd encountered a brief snow flurry at the south edge of Louisville but it was long over before I reach the brewery. The sun was long gone before I left and followed expressways home.

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