Last night was dreadful. We had arrived late into Knoxville, not having left Mammoth Caves National Park until after 4pm. We were staying at the Holiday Inn in downtown Knoxville, and it is very late before we all settle down. Unfortunately the glazing on the windows seemed to be very thin and there was a lot of stuff going on the outside (being a Friday night) and the grownups were still awake in the early hours. Karen got frustrated by the situation and called down to the front desk to get a room change. It was now 2.45am so wanting to speed up the process Karen went down to reception. Nightlife in hotels is not something most of us see but it is in fact a completely different universe inhabited by the weird and wonderful creatures of the night. Karen was welcomed to this strange land by the bug-eyed keeper of the reception desk who aided her with a room swap. With this change made he instructed his security cohort – a female (or so we think) with a plastic hair piece as rigid as any helmet. With the aid of these night beings we picked up sticks (Mark was somewhat grumpy by this stage) and moved to room at the back of the hotel. Still we got very little sleep.
The next day we had a surprise planned for Emily, so weeks ago we had bought tickets for the Hannah Montana concert in Knoxville for this night. The problem was that we had bought these from a broker and despite numerous calls we still did not have the tickets in our hands at this time. Calls to the broker the previous day said that a man called Howard was picking up the tickets from the venue this day and would leave them there for us to pick up later. All this sounded very precarious, particularly as we had paid significantly above the face price on the tickets. We were somewhat nervous and had yet to tell Emily to avoid her being disappointed.
To calm our nerves we went into Knoxville to have some breakfast. We found the Market Square where there are several restaurants and after a bit of searching around we selected the Market Square Café. We sat down and ordered our food (delicious sounding omelettes) from a dozy waitress. After quite sometime we didn’t have our food or had been given our coffee – we weren’t happy. Our food did finally arrived as did the manager of the café – Karen said the food was great but we were disappointed with the service, and to our surprise she said the waitress had left and was not coming back. We felt a little guilty at this – but not for long. As we left the café we got a call from Howard – the ticket man – saying our tickets were at the box office and we should get their soon to avoid the crowds. Not wasting any time we drove off to the venue – parking up a little way away so Emily would not guess why we were there. Karen disappeared off and about 10 minutes later returned smiling. We got Emily out of the car – she was still unaware of what we had planned – and when Karen handed her the tickets the look on her face was a picture.With a little time to kill we went off to do some shopping, after which Karen and Emily were dropped off and Mark and Jack disappeared to go to the cinema, to see the film (Beowolf …which is not very good). A few hours later we got back together again. Emily was still on an amazing high from the concert.
After all this was done we set off to our next stop, Chattanooga, some 90 miles away.
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