Friday, August 12

This morning after our "owner update" we headed about 50 miles east for Oak Ridge and the American Museum of Science and Energy that explains the work that was done there during WWII as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the nuclear bomb.  A facility to make the nuclear materials and a city to house 3,000 workers originally, was built in a few months.  Over the 3 years from 1942 to 1945, it grew to 7,500 workers almost all of whom didn't know what they were actually doing.  They only knew they were helping the war effort and that they couldn't talk about it with anyone, even co-workers.  Women were trained to watch various gauges and make adjustments if they got out of a certain range, but they didn't know why or what they were doing.

Then a quick bite to eat at Wendy's and off to the Norris Dam where Michael thought there was a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) museum.  Turns out it was just a visitor center at the dam, but it was manned by a couple who were retired from the TVA and were quite entertaining with their stories and information about the dam and the TVA in general.

We decided to take smaller roads back home rather than the interstate we took to get there.  The map we have is not very good and so we took a couple of wrong turns in our quest to go through the town of Rocky Top (Michael wanted to say he'd been there) on our way.  After about 5 miles in the wrong direction, we got it straightened out and then ran into a major accident that shut down the road.  Another detour and we finally got back to the interstate only about 12 miles from where we had exited earlier in the day.  Ah well, at least we saw some of the back country.  Tennessee is really a beautiful state, I just with the drivers were better.  We watched agog as a huge semi-trailer clearly ran a red light right before our eyes.  Thank goodness no one was in a hurry going the other way.  This was just the worst of the red-light runners we've witnessed so I've learned to count to at least 3 before going on a green.

Our "gift" for going to the update was a $75 gift card that we could use at various businesses nearby so we used part of it for dinner at another golf course restaurant, Stonehenge.  Fried pickle appetizer (better than it sounds), caesar salad and deep fried shrimp and chips were pretty good.  Including 2 beers and tip the total was only $27 so the price was great.  Restaurant prices are very reasonable here.