10/5 - Paducah to Crossville, Tennessee

Shortly after leaving Paducah on I-24 we crossed the Tennessee River just south of where it flows into the Ohio River. It's the largest tributary of the Ohio, meandering 652 miles from Knoxville where its source is the confluence of the French Broad and Holston rivers. (The French Broad flows through Asheville, for those not familiar with the area.)  

Tennessee River

It was a much better drive today due to smoother roads and Nashville not being as bad as St. Louis to get through.

Nashville's skyline is impressive. It's the first time we've seen it because we've always taken other routes to get around it on previous trips.

I-40 is always a heavily traveled road. The traffic got considerably better once we were past Lebanon, 30 miles to the east.

We got into our site by 1:30 which was great. It gave us several hours to clean the RV's interior so we wouldn't have to do it after getting home. The outside is plastered with a hard casing of bugs but that will have to wait until later. We also had enough time to absorb the hour lost to changing to Eastern time. We can't afford to lose an hour tomorrow so doing it a day early worked out really well.  

We'll get home mid-day tomorrow and have all afternoon to unload. We know from years of experience that saying we'll pace ourselves and not do it all in one day never works. We used to get home in late afternoon and still be unloading after dark. That's why this trip was stretched out so we'd have no more than a three hour drive the last day.

We can't wait to see the reactions of Lovie and the cats when they find themselves back in their house. They're really good about traveling but they're getting very tired of doing it every day.