Robert Earl Keen in Concert

Tonight I would finally get to hear Robert Earl Keen, Jr. in person.  Carol Ann and I left Nacogdoches at 6:00PM and headed West for the 7:30PM concert in Crocket, TX.  I had my iPhone connected to the car’s sound system and we listened to Robert Earl Keen songs during the drive.  We were getting in the mood.

We arrived about 7:00PM.  The parking lot was not very crowded at all.  We parked close to the door and went inside to the “Will Call” window for our tickets.  Robert Earl Keen souvenirs were being sold in the lobby so I had to buy a Robert Earl Keen “The Road Goes on Forever” T-shirt and a “Road Goes on Forever” bumper sticker.  The sticker is over two feet long and is asphalt black with white lines down the middle (like a highway).  On the left-hand side above the road are the words, “The Road Goes on Forever.” Guess I'll have to place on the rear of the motorhome.

We found our seats and although the scheduled start was only twenty minutes away, there were not very many people in the auditorium.  I was a bit concerned.  After we had been seated for perhaps ten minutes I looked up and was startled to see Robert Earl about six feet away from me saying hello to two elderly women sitting right in front of us.   He was wearing an old cowboy hat and shorts (well, he isn’t exactly mainstream).  I could have reached out and touched him.  Instead I immediately started shooting pictures of him.  I mean I almost had the camera in his face!  I was like the paparrazi!  I was thinking about whether or not to ask him for his autograph when all of a sudden I realized that the guy I was snapping photos of, was in fact, NOT Robert Earl Keen.  He was the right age and had a similar beard and did bear a resemblance to Robert Earl, especially if you had never actually seen Robert Earl in person before.  The man ended up sitting about three rows in front of us, probably thinking that I must be a really weird guy.  I was a little embarrassed about the whole thing but Carol Ann began to laugh and I couldn’t help but join her.  I am just so glad that I only took pictures and didn’t reach out and shake his hand or ask for his autograph.  How stupid I felt!

Robert Earl Keen, as I mentioned in my last post, is a Texas singer-songwriter.  I guess you could call his music “Alternate Country” with a little “Americana” thrown in.  Something like “Texacana,” except that makes it sound more like “Tex-Mex” and it’s not.  All of his songs tell a story of life.  They are not a conglomeration of nonsensical words that just happen to rhyme.  His songs might have eight to ten verses, plus chorus, with each verse like a chapter in a book.  He is a storyteller who tells his stories with songs.

7:30PM came and went and the seats began filling up.  The tickets and signs all said 7:30PM but it was 8:00PM when Robert Earl was finally introduced and welcomed to the stage where he was presented with a coonskin cap like Davey Crocket, hero of the Alamo and namesake of the town, wore.  Crocket is the fourth oldest town in Texas.  Nacogdoches happens to be the oldest.  Sam Houston lived in Nacogdoches for four years prior to the Texas Revolution.  A stone house that he built as a trading post is known as Old Stone Fort and located on the campus of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches.  The El Camino Real (now Highway 21) ran East-West through Nacogdoches.  Nacogdoches was the destination and marshaling center for many of the volunteers who came to Texas to fight in the Texas Revolution.  Enough history for now.  Back to Robert Earl.

Robert Earl has been entertaining for about 30 years and has always been, and still is, extremely popular on college campuses in Texas.  Especially his alma mater, Texas A & M.  A large part of the crowd tonight was composed of young people who probably were still in diapers, if they had been born, when Robert Earl's career started, yet they knew the words to almost every song and sang along much of the time.  It was a loud crowd.  A middle-aged woman sat on my left and yelled so loud that my left ear is still ringing.  She stomped and clapped and yelled through the entire performance.  A group of about eight young men were a few rows behind us and they knew exactly when to shout out the refrain or sing the chorus.  When they weren’t singing along they were hootin’ and hollerin’.  Robert Earl really seemed to be enjoying himself and having fun also.

One of the songs was “Merry Christmas from the Family.”  No matter that Christmas is still four months away.  It has always been one of his most popular songs and is really funny in a weird kind of way.  The first line is, “Mom got drunk and Dad got drunk at our Christmas party.”  In an interview about a year ago he was asked about this song and he said that his mom didn’t like it very much, even though his mom and dad were both alcoholics.  I’m not sure if he was serious or joking.

He and his band played for about an hour and twenty minutes without a break.  There last song (before the encore) was “The Road Goes on Forever.”  I knew it would be last so before it started I left my seat and headed towards the front.  I got down on my knees between the stage and the front row and took some close-ups as he sang “The Road Goes on Forever” and the encore, Billy Joe Shaver’s “Live Forever,” which they did acoustically (no amps or microphones).  It was a really great show.  I wish it had been longer as there were more of his songs that I would love to have heard him sing.

On the drive back to Nacogdoches it was pitch black dark, no moon in the sky, and I missed a turn and we ended up in Lufkin, about 20 miles south of Nacogdoches.  We may have taken the scenic route but we couldn’t tell in the dark.

Robert Earl Keen in Concert

To Which Channel is Your TV Tuned?

Carol Ann and I went to the bank today to apply for a construction loan for the new home our contractor son-in-law, Sam, is going to build for us (more about that later).  As in many financial institutions and bars, there were several flat-screen TVs mounted on the walls.  I assume this is to capture the customer's attention while waiting.  Of course, as is the usual custom, all of the TVs were muted and the closed caption was not turned on.  It’s kind of interesting sometimes to try and guess what the talking heads are talking about.  Why do they spend all of that money on TVs and only use the video portion?  

You can tell much about a persons political views by the TV channel they watch.  I have noticed that most of the time the TVs are tuned to a news channel.  If the TV is set to FOX News, you know that the management of the institution is Republican/Conservative.  If the TV is set to CNN, you assume that these people must be Democrat/Liberal.  Well, at the bank this morning, their TVs were tuned to The Weather Channel.  Does that mean they are Independent?  Or are they just being smart and not choosing sides for fear of upsetting a customer?  Maybe it's just a cop-out.  Just once I would like to go into a business and see all of their TVs set on the Cartoon Channel.  You don’t need sound to know exactly what is going on! 

The Road Goes on to Crocket

Robert Earl Keen, Jr. is a Texas singer-songwriter and entertainer.  He got his start in 1984 and has recorded 18 albums.   His songs have been covered by artists such as George Strait, Joe Ely, Lyle Lovett, The Highwaymen, Nanci Griffith, and the Dixie Chicks.  Although a native of Houston, TX, Robert Earl now lives in the central Texas Hill Country and has long been a part of the Austin Music Scene.  He was inducted into the Texas Heritage Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012.

Robert Earl is a graduate of Texas A&M University in College Station, where he earned a BA in English in 1980.  During his college years he became good friends with fellow Aggie Lyle Lovett.  The two of them spent many hours jamming together on the front porch of the house that Keen rented in College Station and together, they wrote “The Front Porch Song.”  After graduation he moved to Austin and began performing at various live music venues in the area.  He tried Nashville but his music wasn’t mainstream enough so he went back to Texas and stayed true to his music.

One of his songs, “The Road Goes on Forever and the Party Never Ends”, struck a chord with me early on.   When I started my blog a couple of years ago it just seemed a natural for the title of the blog.  Robert Earl wrote it 20 years ago and it has become his most popular song.  He plays it at the end of every show.

I’m finally going to see and hear Robert Earl Keen, Jr. in person.  On Friday, August 30, Carol Ann and I are going to Crocket, TX (about an hour’s drive) to see him in concert.  Can't wait.

The Photography Bug

Photography is my hobby and I really do enjoy “capturing images”, especially when traveling.  I do take a lot of what I call “travel photos”, which are mostly candid shots of something or some place that we visited and that I can show to people and say, “this is were we were and what we saw.”  They are basically the same photos that anyone else on the same trip and seeing the same sights would probably take.  There is nothing especially noteworthy about these photos; they are simply a pictorial record of the trip.  They are certainly nothing unique.  However, I am always looking for something that is different.  Something that maybe only I see as a possible subject.  As I drive along I see many possibilities but it is just not possible to stop and check out every possibility to see if it would make a great photograph.  I like to say, “I have taken many award winning photos…” and then after a slight pause complete the sentence with “in my mind.”  If I stopped for every one of them I would never reach my destination.

I have always had an interest in photography, but only since I took early retirement from Abbott Laboratories and moved to Texas 14 years ago have I attempted to pursue the interest.  My parents gave me my first camera when I was ten years old and on my way to summer camp.  The year was 1954 and the camera was a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye box camera.  The film size was 620 and the finished photos were only 2 ¼” x 2 ¼”.  The body was molded Bakelite with a very simple fixed lens.  I’m not sure what the price of the camera was in 1954, but when it was first marketed in 1949 it sold for $5.50, so I doubt that it would have been a great deal more 5 years later.  I still have a few of the old photos that I took at camp but they are quite “dim”.

The first camera that I purchased myself was a Yashica TL-Super, a 35mm SLR (single lens reflex).  I was in Vietnam and several of my friends had purchased Pentax Spotmatic 35mm SLRs from the camp’s PX.  I decided to purchase one also but when I got to the PX they were sold out of the Pentax cameras so I “settled” for a Yashica TL Super 35mm SLR.  I took mostly color slides in Vietnam and still have hundreds of them stored away.  The few remaining prints are black & white and are still very sharp and clear.  After I returned home from Vietnam I rarely used the camera and eventually sold it to a friend. 

I went through several forgettable point-and-shoot cameras over the years before purchasing my first digital camera in the early 2000’s (around 2002 perhaps).  It was an Olympus Camedia (2.0 megapixel I believe) point-and-shoot.  I believe it cost almost $200 at the time.  Then in 2005 I jumped in with both feet and got a Nikon D70S.  A 6.1 megapixel digital SLR.  It came as a kit with 3 lenses and I was hooked.  The D70S (no longer manufactured) was billed as a “prosumer” model.  Not quite a professional camera but a little more than a consumer model.  It cost me around $900, which meant I was serious.  This camera served me well for about 7 years, until I attended a weekend Nikon School in Houston in 2012.  The instructors were discussing and demonstrating all of the neat things that could be done with a Nikon.  Unfortunately, my Nikon, the D70S, did not have very many of the new features being touted.  At the end of the school I told one of the instructors that I had the D70S and that it did not have many of the features that they had demonstrated.  He told me the D70S had been discontinued and if I wanted the new features I would need to purchase a new camera.  For what other reason would Nikon sponsor these weekend classes if not to sell new cameras?  Anyway, I went home and ordered the Nikon D7000 16.2 megapixel digital SLR.  I could use the same lenses I had for the D70S so I only purchased the D7000 body for about $900.  I still have the D70S, there’s nothing wrong with it and it makes a good second camera.  However, I soon learned that the “kit” lenses that had come with the D70S just did not do the D7000’s 16.2 megapixels justice.  Since then I have purchased 3 new lenses of better quality.  Now, all I have to do is sharpen my skills and I’ll be a happy camper.

On our recent 3-month odyssey to the Canadian Maritime Provinces and back, I took over 20,000 shots.  That doesn’t mean there were 20,000 DIFFERENT subjects.  I take multiple shots of a subject, using different settings and shooting from different angles and distances.  My problem is then determining which images to keep and which to delete, which means that I end up keeping too many and as a result it takes a tremendous amount of time to wade through them all to select the ones to make prints of or to include in a photo book. 

When struggling through thousands of photos after returning home from a trip, I look at many and say to myself, “Why did I take pictures of that?”  Those are usually the shots that one would use to show people where you have been and what you saw.  Just travel snap shots that might be put in a book to document the trip.  They don’t have to be technically perfect or artistic.  I do take a lot of that kind of photo and make photo books of our travels to show where we have been.  But these are not the kind of photos that would be entered into a photo contest. 

What I enjoy the most is finding exceptions.  Photos that I personally think are quite good (at least I like them!).  Perhaps it is the colors, textures, or patterns.  Maybe it is an unusual or odd item.  I can’t really explain it except to say that some photos draw me into them while others do nothing for me.  That doesn’t mean that the photos I am drawn to are great photos.   It only means that I really like them and since I don’t try to sell my work, I am satisfied.

I have posted many photos that were taken during our travels on this blog.  However, most of them are “travel photos”, again nothing great or artistic.  Now, over the next few months I will be sorting through thousands of photos in an attempt to select the more promising ones.  Ones that, with a little tweaking, perhaps, will make them stand out a little more.  The ones that I especially like will be uploaded to gallery pages on my Smugmug site.  I will let you know when that is done.  Hopefully, you will like them.

Physics and Driving

We took our time today and spent some time packing up stuff in anticipation of getting home tomorrow.  Do you know how junky a motorhome can look after two people have lived in it for three months?  We only drove to Monroe, LA, about 210 miles, where we checked into the Ouachita RV Park.  We stayed here our first night on the road almost three months ago.

My thoughts wandered, as usual, as I drove. 

Here Comes Another Rant!

Over the past three months I have driven almost 8,000 miles on a lot of different highways, good and bad.  I have seen a lot of drivers, some of them doing stupid things and endangering themselves and those around them.  I have become very understanding of professional truck drivers for the number of miles they drive and what they have to contend with on the highways.  My motorhome and car combined weigh right at 36,000 pounds and is 62 feet long.  It may not be quite as long or as heavy as an 18-wheeler but it is still much larger and heavier than any automobile.  In a collision you could probably guess which vehicle is going to fare worse.  It’s physics.  When a 4,000-pound mass collides with a 36,000-pound mass, the resulting energy (remember Einstein’s E = MC²?) is going to make mince meat of the lighter mass.  That’s because in a collision there is a transfer of momentum (energy) from one object to another.  For example, at 70 mph the energy of the car would be 4,000 x 70², or 4,000 x 70 x 70 = 19,600,00 (let’s not worry about units) and the energy of my RV would be 36,000 x 70², or 36,000 x 70 x 70 = 176,400,000.  I would give you my 176,400,000 units of energy and you would give me your 19,600,000 units of energy.  My RV has 9 (nine) times more energy than your car.  Who’s going to win?

My motorhome doesn’t have the acceleration of an automobile nor the ability to stop as quickly as an automobile.  My rig requires more time and distance than an automobile to pass another vehicle.  This means that I must practice defensive driving if I am to survive.  I have to be vigilant, observant, and know what is happening in front of and behind me.  I have to watch for other vehicles that may be entering the highway in front of me.  I have to be ready to respond quickly when some other driver does something stupid.  People in cars tend to become impatient and agitated with large vehicles on the highways.  These people are usually traveling faster than the large vehicles and don’t like slowing down or having to wait for an opportunity to pass safely.  That’s when their impatience causes them to do something extremely stupid and injure or kill themselves and/or other people. 

Drivers of automobiles don’t seem to pay nearly as much attention to their driving as do drivers of large vehicles.  They talk and text on their cell phones while driving, play with the radio, or look at the other passengers when speaking to them.  They aren’t aware of their surroundings nor are they attuned to the situations and conditions about them.  Plus, they are not always very courteous.  For example, when a truck or RV puts on its left turn signal to enter the left lane (to pass a slower vehicle or to be in the proper lane for an exit) the automobile drivers in the left lane just keep coming, some will even speed up.  They don’t want the large vehicle to pull out in front of them.  Never mind that the large vehicle will probably be pulling right back into the right lane once it is around the slower vehicle. 

If you are driving at 70 mph and take your eyes off the road for only one second, you will have traveled 102.7 feet without seeing anything over that distance.  In 102.7 feet another car could have pulled in front of you, a deer could have jumped in front of you, a pedestrian could have stepped in front of you, or any number of other things may have happened.  And when you look away from the road, to use your cell phone or play with the radio it is probably for more than one second.  In only three (3) seconds you will have traveled the length of a football field without seeing anything along the way.  Why not just blindfold yourself?

As far as cell phones and driving goes, according to the National Safety Council, one accident per second is occurring in the US.  That’s about 645,000 so far THIS year.  Did you know that as far as cell phone distraction goes, statistics and research have shown there is no difference in using a hand held cell phone or a hands free cell phone.  Distraction is distraction.  Your mind is not on your driving.  You need to get your head back into driving and if you really need to use the phone, pull over and stop.

Back to physics again.  We often speak of deceleration (slowing down).  In physics there is only acceleration.  It can be positive (speeding up) or negative (slowing down).  It’s the negative acceleration that gets you in a collision.  Your body is traveling just as fast as your automobile.  If your car collides with another object, say an immovable object, such as a rock wall, the car comes to an immediate stop.  So does your body.  Like they say, it’s not the crash that kills you.  It’s the sudden stop.  From 70 mph to 0 mph in less than one second will exert a force of 98 g’s (g = force of gravity) on your body.  To put that in perspective, astronauts black out during High g training at 4 – 6 g’s. 

End of Rant

Our journey ends tomorrow.  We only have another 200 miles to go and should be home by lunch.  These past three months have been quite a ride!  I’ll have to go back to the beginning and read the blog to remember all of the places we have been and the things that we have seen.  Those of you who have been kind enough to follow this blog please don’t stop just yet.  I’m not done by a long shot.  Also, there will be more trips coming up.  Stay tuned.

The International Towing & Recovery Museum

I awoke this morning and was momentarily shocked when I looked at my watch and saw that it was 8:45AM.  We usually try to be on the road around 9:00AM but that would not happen this morning.  Carol Ann told me she let me sleep in because there was no reason to rush.  We would push our departure time out to 10:00AM, but we were in the Eastern Standard Time Zone and would pass into the Central Time Zone not long after getting back on the road.  So, you could say that we would still be able to leave around 9:00AM.

As we were driving through the Chattanooga metro area we saw a highway directional sign for the “INTERNATIONAL TOWING & RECOVERY MUSEUM.”  I wish that we could have taken the time to stop and check it out because I would never in a million years expect there to be such a museum.  I wondered if it might be some kind of “bubba” museum and decided to Google it once we were stopped for the day. 

There was nothing else of note to mention in regard to the drive today.  We did not decide on where we would stop until 1:00PM (CST) when we pulled off of I-59 for lunch.  Carol Ann wanted to eat at the Waffle House but they don’t usually have parking lots suitable for RV parking.  There were several other restaurants at that exit if we did have to pass on the Waffle House due to lack of parking space.  We drove by the Waffle House and knew immediately there was no chance of parking there.  I had to continue past it and look for something else.  There was a lot of traffic and we were not seeing anyplace suitable.  I noticed a small strip shopping center coming up on the right and decided to pull into the parking lot and turn around.  There was nothing but highway beyond it and I had no idea how far I might have to drive before finding another place to turn around.  There was a one-lane drive for entering the lot and a one-lane drive for exiting the lot.  Each lane was wide enough for only one vehicle and they were lined with concrete curbs.  I took advantage of a break in the traffic and pulled out wide to the left so that I could make the right-hand turn without running over the curb.  At the right of the entrance, where it met the street, lay a folded (or collapsed) temporary highway sign.  I don’t know what the sign said because it was laying face down.  By the time I had committed to the turn with no way to abort I realized that I was going to come uncomfortably close to running over the sign.  The motorhome cleared it just fine and so did the front wheel of the tow car.  Unfortunately, one of the car's rear wheels rode right over the sign.  I parked in an empty section of the parking lot and while Carol Ann made lunch I went outside to check on the car.  No damage thank goodness.  I didn’t go look at the sign.  I just pretended that it never happened.

While eating lunch we checked the maps and GPS and decided to stop for the day in Meridian, MS, which is somewhat further than I had expected to drive.  However, as I said when we began our odyssey, there is absolutely nothing between Tuscaloosa, AL (not far enough) and Meridian (further than we had wanted) so we elected to go on to Meridian.

The weather was partly cloudy most of the day except for several insignificant and short-lived showers, the kind that make you wonder if it would be worth the trouble to turn on the wipers.  We did get some fairly hard rain about an hour before we reached Meridian but it stopped prior to pulling into the RV park at 3:00PM.  No one was in the office and their phone went unanswered so we just picked out a site and setup housekeeping.  I was on the way back to the office to leave a note when the manager pulled up.  The site we chose was OK and I paid her for one night.

I Googled the International Towing & Recovery Museum (internationaltowingmuseum.org).  The museum was started 20 years ago by a small group of towing and recovery professionals and now has 675 members.  The museum has exhibits of tow trucks and towing equipment dating back to 1916 plus hundreds of photographs.  It also includes a library, theater, and, of course, a gift shop.  I expected to find some kind of “bubba” outfit, but this place is for real and appears to be a first class operation.  They are very serious about honoring both the living and fallen members of their vocation.

There is a Hall of Fame to which inductees are nominated for their many contributions to the towing and recovery industry, their families, and their communities.  This year’s nine Hall of Fame inductees will be honored at the Double Tree Hotel of Chattanooga on September 21, 2013 with a full weekend of celebratory activities.  There are currently 285 HOF members.

The Wall of the Fallen is on the outside grounds and features names engraved on plaques to permanently record and commemorate those involved in fatalities in the towing & recovery industry.  The Wall was dedicated on September 9, 2006 and now contains 273 names.  Who would have thought?  Next time you see a tow truck working on the highway be sure to slow down and give it plenty of room.

The Beer Rant

We slept a little late this morning and didn’t leave the RV park until about 9:45AM.  Our goal was still Chattanooga, TN and the weather looked great.  As luck would have it, we ran into quite a bit of rain once we were out on the interstate, but the traffic wasn’t bad and the rain would just come and go.  In other words, we still made very good time.  I-81 ended in Knoxville, TN and we picked up I-75 towards Chattanooga.  In Chattanooga we would get on I-24 for a few miles to I-59 towards Birmingham, AL. 

My mind sometimes works in strange and mysterious ways and I feel a rant coming on. 

Start of Rant.

A Budweiser 18-wheeler passed us as we were driving along.  I noticed their “King of Beers” slogan and said to myself, “It may be the best selling brand of beer in the US, but it’s not because it tastes any better than the others.”  And then my brain just took off with the following:

Budweiser sells as much beer as they do because they have such an excellent marketing department and spend a ton of money.  They have the Clydesdales and the really great Super Bowl commercials every year.  It has nothing to do with taste.  I’ll bet that the majority of people who claim to be brand-loyal to Budweiser wouldn’t be able to pick it out in a taste test with four other blonde lagers.

Then I remembered that Budweiser uses “only the finest ingredients,” one of which is rice.  Rice in beer?  Why does Budweiser use rice, you ask?  Because rice is a starch and starch is a source of fermentable sugar. A fermentable sugar is necessary in brewing beer because the alcohol is produced by the fermentation of sugar.  Malted barley is, and always has been, the most commonly used source of fermentable sugar.  But rice is cheaper and can be added to the brewing recipe so that less of the more expensive malted barley is required.  Budweiser thus costs less to brew since rice is cheaper than malted barley.  Again, it’s money, not taste.

By the way.  Did you know that the Budweiser brand of beer can’t be marketed or brewed in Germany.  There are two primary reasons.  One is because there was already a Czech brand of beer named “Budweiser” trademarked in Germany.  The second reason is because of a very old “German Beer Purity Law,” the Reinheitsgebot, which originated in Bavaria in 1516.  It states that only water, barley, and hops may be used in the production of beer.  The law has been changed slightly over the years to allow a few other ingredients, such as yeast and wheat, but it has never allowed rice to be used as an ingredient.

Something else you may not know is that in 2008 Anheuser-Busch sold the majority of their stock to the Belgian-Brazilian beer giant InBev to create AB InBev, the largest brewing company in the world.  AB InBev immediately began introducing cost-cutting measures (so they could make MORE MONEY).  Some sources claim that this has negatively affected the flavor of the beer.  Rice was already being used in the Budweiser recipe but AB InBev replaced whole rice grains with broken grains (even cheaper).  AB InBev also phased out the use of the high quality Hallertauer Mittelfrüh hops in place of less expensive ones.  According to Bloomberg Business Week Companies & Industries, a former top AB InBev executive has said that the change in hops alone has saved about $55 million a year. 

AB InBev has also purchased Bass and Beck’s brands, which are now brewed in the US.  Before the AB InBev takeover, Beck’s advertised that it was a German beer brewed with German water, German hops, and German malt.  Not anymore.  Beck’s drinkers claim that it now tastes bad and sales of it are dropping. Bass sales have have also dropped. As much as 17% since the change. Again, it’s all about the money.   You will still pay import prices for these beers even though they are brewed domestically.

AB InBev is now in the process of ruining Stella Artois and Goose Island (once a Chicago microbrewery but now brewed in several different InBev mega-breweries in the US).  AB InBev has also acquired about 50% of Mexico’s Grupo Modello, brewers of Corona and Modello and are now attempting to acquire the other 50%.  Approval from the U.S. Department of Justice was still pending as of October 2012.  AB InBev probably won’t stop until they have purchased and ruined all of our beers.

End of Rant.

About lunchtime we realized that we would get to Chattanooga much earlier than last night’s estimate.  The problem was that if we went through Chattanooga we would have to drive further than we wished in order to find an RV park.  So, we decided to stop in Cleveland, TN, which is only about 30 miles from Chattanooga.  We took the Cleveland exit (Exit 20, I-75) at 3:00PM, filled the tank with diesel, and drove over to a KOA at the same exit.  This KOA was almost as empty as the one we stayed in last night.  School started this week in both Virginia and Kentucky so there aren’t many RVs out of the roads this week.