Lexie and I spent some time roaming around the city nevertheless.  There was a Christmas craft fair just up the street from Magpie’s, and in the window, a planter made out of a used tire that we just had to have.  The artist was on hand, and gleeful that we purchased some of her work.  The planter wasn’t the only thing that we would have liked to take home, but we’re still limited on space and budget, after all.  We also poked our heads into the Old Town section of Knoxville with its assortment of vintage clothing stores, and visiting the massive McKay’s Used Books, where we traded in some of the stuff we’re done with to replenish our reading lists.  Knoxville is home to some of the friendliest people we’ve met in the South; most strangers are happy to strike up a conversation and get to know you a little.

We left downtown and pointed the Incorrigible temporarily north, following the signs to the Museum of Appalachia.  Located about twenty miles north of Knoxville, this attraction is billed as a “living mountain village,” and celebrates the pioneer days of the region.  It’s a 65-acre display featuring authentic log cabins including Mark Twain’s family cabin, and displays preserving the heritage of the region.

The Museum of Appalachia also ended up being a chance to give our Demco ExcaliBar tow bar a workout.  The attraction’s dirt parking lot clearly wasn’t laid out with motorhomes in mind, and the Incorrigible quickly found itself turned cattywumpus trying to get out of the too-small dirt lane with no turnaround that the parking lot guide sent us down.  Remember, with the Jeep in tow, we cannot back up more than two or three feet without risking major damage to both the towbar and all of the vehicles involved  The system is designed for pulling, not pushing, so going backwards will quickly result in body damage and a wrecked tow bar.  Fortunately, the ExcaliBar’s quick-release feature meant that getting the Liberty unhitched was an operation that took less than two minutes, and we didn’t block the Museum of Appalachia’s parking lot for very long.  The ExcaliBar has a pressure release lever that makes it possible to remove the pins that attach it to the Jeep even when the bar is under tension, as when the towed vehicle is slightly turned.  Once disconnected, the ExcaliBar folds up against the back of the motorhome.  It went so easily that some of the crowds walking to and from the Museum of Appalachia probably didn’t even notice the unfolding drama.

Lexie and I made a brief tour of the museum, then returned to the parking lot, hooked up again and headed out.  But we’d jumped the gun, it turned out.  The split-rail fence that marked the exit to the Museum of Appalachia’s parking lot created another pinch point that the motorhome/Jeep combination couldn’t navigate, despite the efforts of helpful pedestrians.  Even if we could have made the turn, the Incorrigible’s 102-inch wide body wasn’t going through a ninety-inch gate opening without some serious unpleasantness.  So, we jumped out and practiced disconnecting the Demco bar a second time.  Once again, the operation went smoothly and without drama or difficulty.  When I consider the agony that would’ve been involved it we had a tow dolly or a flatbed trailer to haul the Jeep–unstrap the vehicle, back it off the trailer, remove the trailer, wheel it manually out of the way, back up the RV, get clear, reattach the trailer (moving it manually again, and anyone who’s ever had to manually drag a five hundred-pound trailer over uneven ground knows why we invented livestock), reposition the vehicle, strap it down–I’m thankful for the modern bit of engineering wizardry that is our tow bar.

Holiday shopping at The Factory in Franklin, TN

A neon Santa in storage at The Factory in Franklin, TN

Bow ornamentation of the USS Tennessee on display in Centennial Park, Nashville, TN.

Icicles formed by runoff on I-65.

Icicles formed by runoff on I-65.

A cool used record store in Nashville, TN.

Part of the man floor, featuring (l-r) Amphicar, Messerschmitt, and Smart car.

This quirky, off-the-wall car collection is located in a former Sunbeam bread bakery, just outside of downtown.  Director Jeff Lane is the Charles Addams of car collectors, and his museum is an homage to strange and unusual wheeled vehicles.  Rear-engined, air-cooled Czechoslovakian Tatras, obscure French marques and microcars make up a sizeable component of the assortment, which also includes several propellor-powered cars, one-off prototypes, a two-headed Citroen 2CV, and an array of rally cars, motorcycles and military vehicles including a 62-foot long, 19-foot tall 1959 LARC-LX amphibian that’s too big to fit in the building.

Military vehicles are displayed in the Lane's parking garage.

Also setting the Lane Motor Museum apart from the average car collection is the fact that all of the vehicles are displayed in the round, without chains or stanchions to separate them from the guests.  You can walk all the way around each car, to get an up-close look at the vehicle from every angle. Nearly all of the museum’s display vehicles are functional and require regular exercise, and if you visit on the right day you can sign up for a ride in a Tatra, a Citroen 2CV, or whatever the museum staff feels like taking for a spin that day.

The museum’s restoration shop also has a viewing window, so guests can see the works-in-progress that Lane has collected from dusty garages all around the world.  The collection consists of about 150 vehicles, and is constantly growing.

We arrived just after Thanksgiving, and were just in time for one of the Lane’s periodic “basement tours,” which opens up the museum’s basement storage area to visitors.  Here, we got to see the hidden gems of the collection, vehicles that aren’t yet ready for prime time, or that have been rotated out of the main display area to keep things fresh.  Like these, for instance:

Basement tour schedules and other special event information can be found at the Lane’s website.

The Lane Motor Museum is located at 702 Murfreesboro Pike, in Nashville.  If you get a chance, go there and say hello to what is, at the moment, Lexie’s Favorite Car Ever Except Possibly The 1959 Buick Electra, a 1936 Panhard Dynamic:

Photo courtesy of Ray+Wendy.

Salvation (located in a bar just outside the touristy part of downtown called The Rutledge) has quite a nice layout. It’s clearly a smallish live music venue first and a club second, with a decent-sized entry area, bar up front, and then stage slash dance floor slash raised area with tables in a separate space to the right. The sound system is good, and the lights aren’t ridiculously extravagant.  From what we’re told, this is Salvation’s new location, only a few weeks old.

The dance floor itself is a delightful thing.  Slightly uneven (like concrete that’s been poured into a shallow depression, it raises subtly at the edges), it’s surfaced with a springy, grippy material that feels for all the world like a cross between cork and rubber.  It’s probably some kind of recycled rubber surface.  What it is, is super-comfortable to dance on (because it’s got give–enough that we could do completely painless knee-drops), grippy enough for very fast bouncing but also slick enough for toe-sliding. It’s also slightly absorbent, so beer spills don’t create slippery spots.  Dance-nerd Emmy absolutely loves this dancing surface, and when we make our own club will have one.

Salvation also has a video screen and an outdoor smoking patio (many clubs down south are smoke-free and have outdoor puff-patios) and the goffy Salvation-night staffers are as nice as can be expected, in that “you’re new here and we don’t know you” sort of way.  Lexie and I met R., the unofficial club photographer, and a variety of cool people as well.  Salvation’s patrons are a mix of locals L. and fabulous drag queen A., and world travelers like J. and D. who have settled in Nashville for one reason or another.  Everyone seems to know everyone else, and conversation is easy and relaxed.

The music is a solid mix of goth, synthpop and industrial.  Salvation has a lot of special nights, and hosts concerts regularly as well.  We attended an “eighties night” where the creative DJs spiced up the usual selection of Sirius First Wave-worthy tunes with unusual gems like “Weird Science,” “Doctorin’ The Tardis” and “A View to a Kill,” as well as some more aggro Danzig and Cult tunes.  On regular nights, good stuff includes Covenant, Rob Zombie, God Module, Sisters of Mercy, Imperative Reaction, Rotersand and Psyclon Nine.

Knoxville, after some investigation, advertised a goth-industrial-steampunk club called Temple.  Oh, hello.  That’s three of our favorite things, all in one place.  So, we planned an expedition to the city that was once known as the Underwear Capital of the World to check it out.

We were not disappointed.

Temple all starts with J., who seems to be very much the heart and soul of the thing.  Some time back he apparently found himself at a bar somewhere in town, on one of those dead nights.  “There were like four customers, and so I asked the owner how busy he was on Saturday nights. ‘About like this,’ he said, ‘but with less people.”  So J. asked if he could bring some friends and some music on Saturday.  The owner said sure, so they did just that–showed up with their music, had a grand old time “just playing whatever the fuck we wanted,” and went home.  The bar owner asked if J. and his friends wanted to come out every other week, which was naturally fine with them, as the local goff/alternakids had nowhere else to go on Saturdays.  The very next time they showed up, the bar’s owner said that there’d been so many people the previous week asking where the hell the goff/alternakids were, that he wondered if they wanted to come every week.  And thus, Temple was born.  More than one person during the evening spoke of how hard J. works to make sure that Knoxville’s goth-industrial scene is a welcoming and vibrant one, and from what we saw, he’s successful.

There’s no specific DJ for Temple.  Like any scene, there are eight or nine people who are DJs, and Temple just lets three or four of them take over the decks for one-hour sets each week.  The playlist is “whatever the fuck you want,” which had us a bit leery at first, but proved to be of the awesome–there’s a list of the stuff that made me happy a bit later.  The crowd at Temple is incredibly friendly, too.  Pretentiousness and attitudes are apparently not tolerated; the usual club-drama was there, as it will be in any place you go to, but it’s nicely subsumed and the atmosphere is very welcoming to new people.  J. said, “If you see someone you want to talk to, just walk up and talk to them, and you’ll be in a conversation before you know it.”  This was pretty much true–and believe me, it isn’t always.

Temple takes place in a club (this is its second location; they outgrew the original bar, it sounds like) that used to be a movie theater that also served food.  Whuh?  Long story.  Anyway, upshot of it is that the original lobby (where the box office is) has been turned into a small auxiliary bar and dance space, while the main part of the theater is now the club.  The screen has been replaced by a stage and wonderful seven-foot high red speaker-stacks on either side, and then the dance floor is in front of it.  The floor spans the width of the theater, and is maybe half the length of our home club’s massive dance floor–so it’s half as deep but twice as wide.  There’s a lot of dancing space on the polished tile.  From there, the floor rises, like it does in theaters, and there are three or four small terraces full of tables and chairs for socializing, with the main bar on the topmost level.  It’s very easy to get around, and the lighting is properly dim but still unusually bright for a goffclub.  The outdoor smoking patio is the only place where it’s easy to talk, of course, so even nonsmokers will spend a fair amount of time out there.

Wandering around to get our bearings, we met Z, a steampunk-stuff artist who had a display/sales table.  She was super-friendly as well; Lexie and I hung out talking with her for a goodly while, while the music ramped up.

Listing the good stuff we heard will give you an idea of how eclectic the mix was.  We danced to “Strict Machine” by Goldfrapp, “Exterminate Annihilate Destroy” by Rotersand, Concrete Blonde’s “Bloodletting,”  “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” by Pop Will Eat Itself, “I’m Your Boogie Man” and “Pussy Liquor” by Rob Zombie, an “Spin Spin Sugar” by Sneaker Pimps, “Tear You Apart” by She Wants Revenge, “Nemesis” by VNV Nation, “100%” by Angelspit, and “Straight to Video” and “Shut Me Up” by MSI.   I heard some wonderful new things too, and the DJ who spun them was not only kind enough to tell us what it was, but said, “Come back up at 2 when I’m done and you can have the CD.”  So she just gave me the whole mix of her set!  So, I learned and go to keep “Dirty Laundry” by Bitter:Sweet and  “Supermassive Black Hole” by Muse.

In the meanwhile, we met people.  We met Spleen and Karmakaze, who are two of Asylum’s three DJs.  We also met R., who runs the place where Asylum takes place, and S., and E., and…anyway, I’m not used to meeting so many people so quickly.  It left us with a good feeling.   As the night wound down, R. and his roommate C. invited Lexie and I back to their loft for an after-gathering, and we wound up staying up all night.  A good time was definitely had in Knoxville.

The hotel room offered up another luxury that’s missing from the RV as well:  the chance for a long, hot soak in the bathtub.  Our water-frugal lifestyle aboard the Incorrigible means that long hot showers and baths aren’t available to us, and I’m sure I was as eager to explore the Super 8’s bathtub as I was to see what interesting treasures Knoxville had to offer.  (Note to self: exercise restraint, and do not waste a ton of hot water when you visit people.)

On the way to Knoxville, we saw a gorgeous rainbow as the rain that’s been hovering over Nashville for the past week finally broke.  We also saw a truck pulling a cool WWII-era German military motorcycle, complete with sidecar.  Did BMW make bikes for the SS?  Not sure if it was real, or a replica.  We were also nearly run off the road by a fellow in a minivan who was behind us in the left turn lane, then abruptly decided that he needed to go before us and turned at the same time we did, trying to pass us as we turned!  Um, on what planet is that legal, or smart?  (This is apparently a Nashville thing, as a delivery boy on a scooter tried the same thing downtown a few days later.)

We also stopped off at several interesting-looking places, and cruised through Lebanon, Tennessee.  Lebanon’s got the coolest combination of a town square and a roundabout, and it’s ringed with some voluminous antique stores.  These aren’t the “antique malls” that are springing up along the freeways all over the place, they’re big in the old-school, old storefront + attic packed to the gills way.  Cuz’s Antiques sported a crazy collection of high-dollar, large-scale European imports (they had a $3000 Chinese wedding bed and an $11,000 pair of fifteen-foot high wrought iron gates, f’gosh sakes) and was entertaining to wander through.

While at Cuz’s, we also spotted this relic.  I’ve come across segregation artifacts in Southern antique stores before, and my knee-jerk reaction is always to be angry at it.  “How dare they try to sell something like that,” the part of me that wants to take offense snarls.

But after a moment of consideration, I find that I’m actually glad to see the thing up there.  First off, it’s a legitimate piece of history, and not the sort of thing we should pretend never existed.  That’s the surest way to repeat it.  And then I realize that’s exactly what it is:  history.  It’s past, it’s dead.  If it wasn’t, that window would still be up in some train station somewhere and nobody would think anything of it.  The very fact that this window’s in an antique store, alongside lots of other outdated relics, is a testament to the fact that things have improved in this country.

Besides, it cost about half of what the other windows hanging up there did.  So in addition to being a relic of a sad, silly time, apparently nobody wants it.

So, ultimately we found ourselves in Knoxville on a clear but cold day.  It was just a touch too chilly for serious pedestrian exploration, so we bumped around town looking at the sights and found what’s known as the Old Town section of the city. It’s populated by nightclubs and vintage clothing stores, mainly.  Our friend Amanda recommended a bakery called Magpie’s, but we couldn’t find it.  We’ll look for it next time, though, because we actually had quite a good time in Knoxville, it turned out, and we plan to go back.

The park where we’ve stopped to spend the bulk of our time in Tennessee is called the Owl’s Roost, and it’s the very picture of a sleepy little RV park.  Most of the vehicles here are permanent residents rather than travelers, as evidenced by the number of camper trailers with flat tires and obvious structural issues, and a couple of the motorhomes that have been partially disassembled and have porches attached to them.  There are a few old cars about as well, and the park lacks a pool or any of the usual KOA-type amenities.  We’re close enough to I-65 that freeway noise is a constant, soft companion.  There are a few rigs that appear to belong to snowbirds and other travelers–they, like the Incorrigible, look newer and in better shape than the permanent residents, though there’s an early-eighties Monaco a couple of slots over from us that’s in gorgeous shape.  (Now, consider that, at 13 years old, the Incorrigible can be categorized among the “newer” rigs here…)

Sound terrible?  You’re getting the wrong impression.  Lexie and I are quite happy holed up here with the Incorrigible.  The neighbors are quiet at night, and during the day it looks like many of the Owl’s Roost’s residents are off working anyway.  The trees are big and in the process of dropping a storm of yellow leaves on everything, and the slots are narrow but it’s got a pleasant sort of organization to it.  The small convenience store sells beer (though it’s not open late) and the staff is friendly.  The shower rooms and on-site laundry facility are Spartan but clean and far from scary as well.

The only barking dog is an angry little Dachsund/Chihuahua mix next door, and the little guy is nicely muffled when he’s inside, which is most of the time.  Lexmachine and I don’t feel nervous leaving the Incorrigible unattended for a day at a stretch, nor did we feel like we were in the fishbowl when we rolled home at two in the morning after a night of clubbing.  The owners of half-million dollar diesels will probably turn their noses up at this place, but the Owl’s Roost has a comfortable feeling for us that makes spending a month here a promising and pleasant notion.