Rust Belt Road Trip: Revisiting the Midwest by Rail Fan

[dlgoff]

Instead, for lunch, I sought out Cincinnati's best-known culinary specialty: chili! Specifically, the five-way chili at Camp Washington Chili:

Going upwards from the bottom you have (1) spaghetti, (2) chili, (3) beans and (4) diced onions, and finally (5) shredded cheese. The two packages of oyster crackers are for crumbling into the leftover chili sauce and soaking it up when you're finished.

Man does that look good. Question. Did you manage to get to the oyster crackers point.

 

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Did you manage to get to the oyster crackers point.

Yep, I ate the whole thing. Another reason why I didn't look for a German restaurant for dinner.

 

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On the final day of the trip, I headed down through Kentucky and Tennessee to the Carolinas, mostly on I-75 etc. I made one detour from the Interstates: US-25E from Corbin KY to Newport TN. This is mostly four lanes with easy driving, and bypasses the traffic near Knoxville TN and along I-81 which is a major truck route.

Going past Corbin I saw a billboard for the Harland Sanders Café and Museum, the "birthplace" of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Unfortunately I missed the turnoff. I didn't feel like stopping and turning back to look for it, because I'll almost certainly go that way again.

[added: I did visit there a year later.]

Eventually I turned off for lunch in Pineville KY, and found myself in the middle of a street festival.

This was where I found the T-shirt that I posted in the Lame Jokes thread.

A bit further on was Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, where the far western tip of Virginia meets Kentucky and Tennessee. Settlers poured through here across the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky beginning in the late 1700s, following the Wilderness Road blazed by the legendary Daniel Boone.

At Pinnacle Overlook (which is in Virginia but whose parking lot is in Kentucky) you can look west towards Middlesboro KY, with the Cumberland Gap passing in front of you.

Then you can turn to the left and look south towards the village of Cumberland Gap TN. Traffic no longer goes through the gap. US-25E and a railroad (behind and to the right of the village, respectively) both use tunnels. The highway tunnel opened in 1996. I'm pretty sure I remember driving through the gap in the mid 1980s on the old two-lane version of US-25E.

Down in the village, you can look upwards towards the gap, hike a short distance up to a trail that was built through the gap after the old road was removed, and see the railroad tunnel entrance (built in 1897) near the trail parking lot.

From here I drove pretty much straight home to South Carolina, with a stop in Asheville NC for dinner.

 

[jtbell]

I've now replaced all the older pictures (through post 32) with new versions processed from the original photos in Photoshop. I also added a few new pictures here and there.

I saved one of the old versions so you can see the difference below. Before I go on my next trip, I'd better look for a good photo-resizing app for my iPhone.

Old version, reduced to "Medium" size (640 px wide) in the iPhone's Mail app:

New version, processed in Photoshop (800 px wide):

 

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When I did this trip, nearly a year ago, I had no idea that I was anticipating a trend. This morning I saw on TV an interview with Priceline's CEO which mentioned their "top emerging travel cities" in the US. In positions 2 and 4 are Cleveland and Detroit, respectively!

I should have posted more pictures of Detroit. Instead, here's a video that I posted on YouTube showing a trip around downtown Detroit on the elevated peoplemover system.



Geographical trivia, easily answerable with a glance at a map: when I'm heading towards the Detroit River after about 8:10, looking towards Canada, in which compass direction am I heading?