Saturday, July 12, 2025

2025 Big Truck across the Southeast, day 3

Day 3 - final day in Nashville, and after our evening filled with socialization (a term you'd be very familiar with if you had an only child who lets you know when there has been 'too much socialization') yesterday, we didnt get to bed til well after 1am, which is 2am to us. Long way of saying it was pretty quiet in the big truck until 9ish. Today's ad lib - head into town to check out the Adventure Science Center.
This joint was admittedly targeted toward a younger audience (think children's museum) but still had some cool exhibits, with lots of interactive sciency things (technical term) for us to check out. Mars expedition rig - definitely need this tire/wheel combo on the Jeep, could probably snag it for a cool $1-2B factoring in the pre-DOGE General Dynamics government discount (ICE agents, if you're being dispatched, we're at site 353 in Stone Mountain Park).
Next up was a solar system exhibit, where as Jordan was pointing out that Pluto is her spirit planet,
a family with a couple of toddlers was walking through the exhibit. The wife asked "Are these planets life-sized?" Husband shot a look of disbelief, and asked "Do you mean to scale?" to which she indignantly replied "No, are they life-sized?" He took a second, composed himself, and said "yes, they are life-sized to scale." My man is a real time problem solver. A quick "who wore it best?"
Followed by us sending Jordan up the observation tower for a view of downtown Nashville (which only she got to see),
and then a quick photo op before peace-ing out
We then made a quick executive decision to cruise down Broadway since we had stuck to 'East' (as the cool kids say) last night. We just wanted to see the spectacle. The spectacle (one of probably a dozen or so bachelorette parties we saw in our 20 minutes on Broadway - it was 2pm on a Saturday afternoon):
It was definitely entertaining, glad we at least drove down there to see all the honkytonks, hear all the competing live music, and get stuck behind 3-4 pedal bars and at least as many party busses. We were not hit by any chairs, but I can only imagine how out of hand this area must be on a regular basis.
We hightailed it back to the campground, packed up, pulled a quick Cousin Eddie in the campground's somewhat makeshift dump station, then embarked on a 5ish hour drive through the mountains toward Stone Mountain Park.
After a bunch of 6%, 8% grades, lots of downshifting, unfortunately no double clutching, but plenty of white knuckle driving - we then were treated with Atlanta traffic and 6 lanes of chaos. Things went well.
As if that wasn't enough pressure, I was being inundated with billboards with a fairly aggressive marketing approach:
Georgia - where you can get pulled over for doing 71 in a 70, and also be threatened with eternal damnation while just trying to spend some tourist dollars at your parks. I, if anyone, appreciate the direct approach. Maybe, as has been suggested to me several thousand times, consider your tone. Giving the threatening environment, I was constantly checking to make sure the Jeep was still with us.
After averaging a solid 7.2mpg on this tank - consider that we were dragging the Jeep through the mountains in triple digit heat with the A/C on its feeble highest setting - we finally rolled into Stone Mountain Park, and proceeded to navigate into a pretty tight site in the dark.
Tomorrow we are quite excited to see if we are dangling off a cliff, or nestled into one of the best sites in the park. My money is on the latter. Either way, we are hunkered down in Stone Mountain, GA - which our friend Single F graciously pointed out is the rumored hometown of none other than Jake the Snake Roberts.
If this is true, or even if it isn't, Jordan better be prepared at some point tomorrow to be hit with one of the cleanest DDTs of all time, a move I have both delivered and received (easy Reinke) hundreds of times during high school. Damien will be proud, even though he is likely now a pair of cowboy boots.
In the morning, some combo of hiking Stone Mountain and visiting the Georgia Aquarium. Also, during the proofreading portion (yes, sometimes someone actually sees this before it is published), Kimberly snapped this photo of the author. It is nice to see that the 100% humidity does not impact the ginger fro in any meaningful way.
Cheers!
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