Knoxville--week one

We made it to Knoxville and are starting to get settled in (not quite there yet, though, so no pictures of the new place for now). We decided to take the time between the move-in and the start of Brady's internship to explore the town and be on vacation a bit. The verdict: Knoxville is all right. We found a lot of  great, free stuff to do around town. We decided to pick one thing each day to be our motivator to get more boxes unpacked. This week's itinerary:

Monday

Not a ton for this day, besides several trips to Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, etc. trying to get all the odds and ends you seem to need in a new place, including groceries. It was too bad that for Monday's activity we chose to check out the local co-op. We were pretty burned out on shopping by that evening. It's small, but seems good. Brady thought it was funny to talk to "hipsters" with southern accents.

Tuesday

Still pretty busy with unpacking, so we stayed close to home. We decided to look into the park by our house. Amazing. It's right up the street from our place and absolutely gorgeous. It has a paved greenway all around the border of the park and winding through it. I will try to restrain myself with how many pictures I include below (for a couple of people who have been in the desert for so many years, we were amazed at this place).

The greenway

The pond. The part of Knoxville we live in is called Fountain City, so I think it's some kind of rule that all the parks have to have some kind of fountain in them. At least the two in this area I've noticed have.

More of the pond. It's not that big, but I liked this tree.

Some smaller, non-greenway paths run through the park as well. We found this to be a good place to spot fireflies around dusk.

OK, last park picture. Brady wanted me to take this one. We're used to mostly brown and gray birds. We've seen lots of more colorful birds--cardinals and blue jays mostly--around here. We've also sighted or heard a lot more "critters" around here. Brady wanted to record some of the sounds of the park for our non-southern readers to experience. Maybe another time. The chorus of frogs, birds, crickets, and probably some others we haven't identified is something else.

Wednesday

Knoxville has a great farmers market. They hold it for a few hours on Wednesdays and for longer on Saturdays. Everything looked so good, it was difficult to hold back. Luckily it runs well into November here, so we'll have lots of opportunity to go back.

We were missing our herb garden. We got a great deal on some fresh herbs to plant out on our balcony, though, so hopefully that will keep us going. We have already used a bit from these now that our kitchen is mostly functioning.

We also got some green beans and a cucumber that didn't make it into the picture. That red tomato is HUGE. And this is the part of the country to get good peaches at a good price. And the honey is motivating me to want to cook (we need some good biscuits now).

We also went to the art museum on Wednesday. It's not huge, but had some interesting stuff. They wouldn't let us take pictures there, so I'm posting a link to one of our favorite exhibits. It was this really cool furniture from the Cumberland Furniture Guild. It pretty incredible work.

Thursday

We found out that the city puts on free concerts every week during the summer. Apparently it's something that just started, so we picked a good time to come to Knoxville. This Thursday was a bluegrass band called The Grassabillies. They were a lot of fun. We probably won't be converted to country music entirely during our stay here, but these guys seemed not to cross the line into mainstream, commercial country music that we don't enjoy. The group that followed did cross that line, and it was getting late, so we didn't stay through their whole set. There is a fine line between country and all the genres that can feed into it (like folk or bluegrass) that Brady could probably explain better than I could. At any rate, we had fun watching these guys.



The Grassabillies with a bit of Knoxville behind them. They did a lot of covers songs: Johnny Cash, Guns 'n Roses, Dolly Parton, Janice Joplin, and the Beatles. They had some original songs too. Brady caught just a bit of one of their instrumental songs, just to give you a taste.



We didn't get any video of the yodeling, but it was impressive. Needless to say, after this, we felt initiated into Knoxville life.

Friday

Free Shakespeare play. A local theater company performs in Market Square (same place as the farmers market) in the evenings for part of the summer. We saw A Midsummer Night's Dream. Not exactly Shakespeare festival, but it was pretty good. It was kind of hard to get into at first because of the noise from some of the restaurants on the square, but overall it was a good show. We will probably go back sometime in the next couple of weeks to see them do Hamlet.

Saturday

We were worn out. We checked out a bigger park in town with a longer greenway so Brady could do a longer run (almost 8 miles!) while I walked. We swung by the farmers market again for a couple odds and ends, came home and tried to get some work done. Then we gave up and went to Harry Potter instead.

Soooo . . . who wants to come visit? We are missing some of our old haunts from back home (and I am desperately missing Utah's grid system for street names), but we are getting to like it here. Next on the agenda before work officially starts: the Smoky Mountains. We'll keep you posted.