GOT PICS :)
Well, it’s Labor Day and I didn’t do much of anything . It was a lazy good day with some hamburgers and hot dogs and my nieces were in town. It was Elizabeth’s birthday celebration today and I played the part of human jungle gym. It was a very nice day with sunshine, mild temperatures and a good breeze. I’m really wishing I hadn’t stayed in town, but since I did, I got some great pictures out of the 100 or so I took yesterday like this one:
This is an excellent example of the local agrigulture and general culture mentioned in the previous post. This week will only be 4 days long and it’s payday on Friday!!
Local Agriculture
Friday I got a personal tour of Chattanooga and took some (I think) pretty cool photos. I’m working on post-processing on a few of them to put up on flickr… maybe finish those today. My outlook was broadened quite a bit. I thought the only thing there was a hospital and a lot of stinky industrial factory type industry, but IT’S NOT TRUE! There really is a downtown, even though I’ve never really seen it, and it has quite a bit of old architecture that’s full of character. One of the things I noticed was an extensive use of glass blocks in a lot of the old buildings, also, when looking from the pedestrian bridge over the river, one notices that blue is the requisite color for new architecture in the city. Lots of really neat out-of-the-way kind of places around as well. We ate at Durty Nelly’s Pub for lunch which was pretty good, where I had a reuben, which was VERY decent. For supper we went to the Bluff View Art District and mosied through the sculpture garden and cool courtyards and ate at Tony’s Pasta which was incredible. I had a dish of Baked Chicken Pesto, but that’s not entirely the proper name… It was excellent food and atmosphere anyway.
Now to satisfy the title… I grew up in Cheatham County, which borders Metropolitan Davidson County, but seems a lifetime away from the city. One of the great things about this time of year, right about the beginning of September is the time when the darkfire tobacco gets smoked in the barns. This produces an incredible amount of smoke, usually enough to fill the valley the barn is in with smoke and it hangs like a thick fog. The smell is INCREDIBLE!! It’s not like a cigarette or any finished tobacco product, it’s just unique unto itself. Well, since I have a motorcycle now, and, in my opinion, it’s the best way to experience the sight and smell of this phenomenon, we tooled around part of the county yesterday looking for some of this in action. I expected to see maybe a few barns, not really expecting to see more than five or six, but we saw 30 barns in about 35 miles! Almost every turn yielded more smoking barns, and statistically speaking, that’s about a barn per mile! It was one of those evenings to remember, everything nice and calm, fall in the air and the sight and smell of home everywhere. I think I’ll go back today and try for some pictures of the best ones…