Sorry for the long silence but I had to go out of town for work a few days after we got back from our vacation and I’ve been crazy busy trying to catch up at work.
So, here’s the third installment of our excellent adventure...
After an amazing two days in Oxford, we packed up the car Monday morning and headed to our next stop - Knoxville, Tennessee (seven hours away). It was a beautiful drive that took us through the backroads of Mississippi, through Alabama and into Tennessee (we even dipped down into Georgia for about ten minutes). Oliver was, once again, a complete trooper in the car. He slept some, played some and fussed a little (just a typical day for him, really). We got to Knoxville around five or so, just barely beating a huge thunderstorm rolling into town. After the rain cleared, we drove downtown and ate dinner at a restaurant on the river, near the University of Tennessee campus (not nearly as pretty as the Ole Miss campus) and found ourselves dining with a five year old:
Seriously. How grown up does he look here? He loved watching the ducks in the water while we ate dinner. Afterwards, we walked down the river to see what we could see.
The next morning we made a quick getaway and pushed through the final stretch to Richmond. The drive was unbelievably gorgeous. We went through the Smokey Mountains and then through Virginia farm country. It was so pretty (and you will just have to take my word for it since I don’t have pictures).
After another typical day in the car, we arrived in Richmond around four and quickly found our way to Jennifer and Tom’s house. Their house was built in 1920 and is in a great neighborhood. You can walk to a huge park, to numerous bars and restaurants and to many museums. It makes me wish we lived in a walking neighborhood.
We unloaded the car (I’m pretty sure that when Tom saw how much stuff we brought he thought we were going to stay forever) and then relaxed a little bit. The weather was a little gray and wet but when Jennifer got home from work we still went out to explore the nearby park. Byrd Park is just a few blocks away from their house and is the home to what must be 90 percent of the US Canadian goose population. They (and the evidence of them) were everywhere. Oliver loved staring at the birds. We walked for over an hour exploring the park and the neighborhood.
We went back to their house, fed Oliver and packed him off to bed and spent a great evening drinking wine and catching up with Jennifer and Tom. We’ve missed those two since they left for Virginia! We called it a night much later than we intended and headed to bed.
The next four days were a whirlwind of exploring Richmond. We saw lots of parks and Oliver sat on lots of benches - a favorite pastime of his judging by this picture:
We saw Civil War landmarks, the Virginia capitol and the Richmond Children’s Museum, which had this disheartening sign outside:
but made up for it with fun exhibits like this:
We ate some amazing food - both at Jennifer and Tom’s house and abroad. We had lunch one day at a place called The Black Sheep where we waited outside in the rain for twenty minutes and were rewarded with delicious sandwiches. I had the Miss E sandwich - avocado, bacon, lettuce, tomato, red onion and horseradish on toast with a side of deviled eggs. Oliver had a watermelon, mint and feta salad. Yum!
On Friday, Tom, Brian, Oliver and I met Jennifer at a park by her office and brought boxed lunches from a stand located in the park near their house, called Sally Bell’s.
Each lunch came with a sandwich, a deviled egg, a side of potato salad or macaroni salad, a savory cheese cracker and a super cute mini cupcake - all homemade and yummy!
That’s it for now. There’s still plenty to come from our visit to Richmond, though, including the tale of our awesome evening at the botanical gardens and how Oliver fell in love with the worst band ever.
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