Day 2: Tennessee

Quite miserable weather-wise. It rained most of the day but I kept shooting. The forecast for the next couple days looks much better. The dogs got tons of exercise today as I found a couple of huge and wonderful places for them to romp between downpours. In the morning, a rest area off I-40 that had a huge area with hills and trees. And, even better, in the afternoon in Nashville, we stumbled upon an abandoned golf course. The following doggie shots are from there. Nik in a "down" on a tarp or rolled up golf green of some sort. He's the athlete and circus dog of the family at this point. I can send him anywhere, with "out" and "way out", left and right directionals, "hup" to jumps things, and "table" to lay down on things. He'll do ANYthing for his ballies and LOVES to run.



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Gremlin demonstrates her interpretation of the begging trick. This is one of the mandatory tricks of all my family members. Grem's version is with her left paw tucked into her body and sort of waving her right paw around. All dogs do it slightly differently.



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Grem made a grand discovery at the golf course: some sort of animal skull. This is her exhibiting self control ("leave it!") and fatigue. And note attached to her collar is a 50 foot long line. She has taken off on me too many times, full tilt to nowhere, so we are doing lots of recall training.



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Grem and Grip take turns in my lap for interstate driving. Here's an overhead shot (yes, taken while driving). That's my boob, which Grem is using to support her head, and my lap below. I love the fangs in this shot.




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OK -- moving on to some of today's sights...

The Oarsman -- a neat bit of public art in Knoxville:



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A couple shots from a Gulf station in Harriman. I've never seen a truck with these embossed signs before. And a neat old truck.




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Also in Harriman - an example of why I travel as much as I can and squeeze as much shooting in per day as I can. This is all that's left of a great Robo Car Wash. It broke my heart to see it gone. You would pull into the bay and a machine would circle around and clean your car on this track:



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See this page for a photo of what the place looked like in 2005:
http://agilitynut.com/modarch/carwash.html

Another nicely-preserved Robo Wash in Patchogue, NY at the bottom of this page:
http://agilitynut.com/modarch/ny.html

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On a slightly happier note, here are a couple of neglected survivors:

This "See Rock City" sign stands mostly obscured by trees and below road-level in Cookeville. It's hard to tell from this photo but it's billboard-sized but square:



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This Cookeville cowboy sign surely won't be around much longer. The lot behind him is a huge pile of dirt now. I don't know if he was originally a metal sign (replaced with plastic) or what he advertised. The construction leads me to believe that the top part of the sign revolved.



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A couple more shots in the rain from Cookeville. Trains and depots are not normally something I photo (I have enough topics at my website already!) but these were awfully nice. The depot is on the National Register of Historic Places and has a little museum inside now.