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It was decision time this morning as we had seen all we wanted to in Tennessee and although we still have the hire car until Sunday, it is supposed to be returned to Nashville which west and we want to head north. Our original plan was to hand the car back and fly to Washington but we missed out by one day on the really cheap airfares and are now looking at a fair sum to fly up there.
So we went to the Hertz office at Knoxville airport and the very helpful lady there organised a new agreement for us, keeping our same car and dropping it at Baltimore Airport (where we fly to Niagara Falls from) all for about half what the airfares would be!!!!!!!!! Another bit of grovelling that worked well!
We drove firstly east and then north, passing through some nice suburbs and then once on the freeway we saw some lovely farms and nice open country. Once into Virginia (state number 12 we have visited) the countryside was very picturesque with rolling hills and some quite high mountains and we made good time on US81 before a thunderstorm and some very heavy rain slowed us up.
The traffic was very thick and the number of trucks or eighteen wheelers as they call them here, was simply amazing! It seemed that every third vehicle was a truck and they hurtle along at 70 - 80 mph in all conditions. At one point we saw on the opposite carriageway that a truck had lost its load on the freeway and the traffic was banked up for miles.
Tonight we have made Roanoke which a city in mid Virginia, on the banks of the New river and is best known as the northern start of the Blue Ridge Parkway which runs for 469 miles through a series of national parks all the way to the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. The Parkway has a speed limit of 45mph and has no commercial vehicles, giving travelers a chance to travel south at a leisurely pace and look at the marvelous scenery. It took 50 years to build and was started during the Depression of the 1930's to give people work.
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