Knoxville, TN

So I've never actually been to Knoxville...
Until yesterday (and today technically) that is-

After the week of horrific emotional, mental, and sometimes even physical pain that accompanied the completion of my course work for my degree as of Wednesday, I somehow conned myself into packing up some clothes, hard drives, and Alaska and pointing my tires North. Yes, folks, I actually decided to attempt the drive to Michigan to spend Thanksgiving with my family.
Originally the plan was to leave at 4am on Wednesday after finishing school Tuesday BUT, due to Tuesday's all-nighter, I decided that sticking to that plan would probably result in some sort of death and destruction of either me, or my car, or both. I decided to instead sleep Tuesday night and Wednesday morning and then finish a million and a half things that needed to get done :get car fixed, help move Angela out of the apartment, see some friends I won't see in a long time after I leave, etc... By 6pm Wednesday I was finally on the road home. By Knoxville, TN, I felt like I was going to pass out so I stopped and stayed the night with a newer friend of mine Jen V.

Let me tell you right now that Jen, although I know her mostly through my friend Tyler, is one of the coolest girls I have ever met. She rules. Her and Tyler were waiting for me at like 1am and let me crash on her couch. Even better, she didn't care if Alaska ran around all night.. this was AWESOME for me because Alaska did JUST that and then was tuckered out all day for the drive today. Awesome!

Anyway I got to see Knoxville a little, at night and in the morning. I don't know why but I wasn't expecting it to be so hilly! The entire place was just up and down and up and down. It was actually quite lovely and I'm glad I got a chance to stop.

I left Jen's at 7:30 am and drove for a half hour before I had to stop to eat... my stomach was killing me. I have NOT been eating right these past few weeks- so I decided to treat myself to a Thanksgiving breakfast at Shooneys! I had an awesome omelet there and potato wedges. mm. After that it was pretty-much smooth sailing back to michigan. The only traffic that I hit was outside of Cincinnati and between Detroit and Troy, Michigan... even then, though, even though it was bumper to bumper nobody was going under 60mph.

I made it home in about 9 hours counting my half hour Shooney's stop and right in time for Thanksgiving dinner. A highlight of this year? My Uncle Chris is in town and nobody EVER sees him... I haven't seen him in 3 years and my family hasn't seen him in probably more like 5 or 6. It was so awesome having him. I think we had 15 people in all this year... not too bad- smaller than I'd like but so awesome.

I stole my brother for a bit after dinner and went for a ride with him into Pontiac to see if we could find this car stereo place I heard about on the radio on my ride up today. On our little mini-trip we saw this doughnut place that was open. We were like huh? Open on thanksgiving?! So we stopped in and it turns out that we discovered a 24 hour pizza, doughnut, coffee, and stuff place on Telegraph on the way to Pontiac. AWESEOMeST THING EVER! AND on top of that it looks like a triangle-roof mountain diner and has sweet low round diner bar stools. The whole place is so chill... best part? The guy gave us both free doughnuts! We were mad full but we took them home anyway- looks like breakfast tomorrow won't be turkey thank GOD.
(pix will be added soon)

I miss Michigan a lot. I'm only staying here until Sunday night or Monday. I have so many people to see before then. I'm so excited to be back for a little bit. mmmmmmmmMIchigan. OMGOSH tomorrow I think I'm going to be able to go to the Cider Mill.. more on that later!

We could be closer than you know,
Chelsea