Off to new adventures

We're on a road trip! It's hard to believe sometimes, but we actually survived the semester and finals week! To say the least, everybody was relieved and ready for some new adventures. Since we have some time left until our internships as well as summer classes will start, Annika and I decided to take a road trip to see as many places as we could until we have to start working again. At first we wanted to go north, to see the Niagara Falls, Cleveland, Toronto, and Detroit, but then we decided that we needed some sun and nice weather to relax for a while. So here we are, so far we've been to Nashville and Chattanooga and it's already a great adventure. We rented a car in Columbus and started our journey to Nashville, Tennessee. I didn't see much of Ohio so far and, to be honest, it isn't that exciting, but it was a great start for our road trip and we very much enjoyed the sunshine and the endless highways. Our first break was in a very small town in Kentucky, where we stopped along the road to eat something and relax for a few minutes. After a while, however, a car stopped besides us and we already panicked a little that we did something illegal, and a 70-ish guy with a Vietnam Veteran hat stepped out of his car, approached us and asked if we were okay. Certainly, we were a little surprised by that but he just wanted to know if we needed help since apparently it wasn't something ordinary that two girls just stopped with their car. After we could convince him that we were really okay and that we only wanted to take a break, a very weird five minute conversation followed of which we understand about 5 words because he had a really thick mid-Western-ish accent which was almost impossible to understand. We soon took off and by accident drove through the beautiful town of La Grange, Kentucky. Before that, I didn't know anything about Kentucky, I don't even know if I've ever seen a picture.
Surprisingly, Kentucky actually is really pretty, at least in this season, and we enjoyed some iced tea in this beautiful little town, which pretty much was coffee shops and second-hand shops.. After our break we continued our journey and a couple of hours later we arrived in Nashville.

Since our road trip was very spontaneous we didn't do much research about what to do in town, so we walked around and enjoyed the nice weather. We walked down Broadway and as you would expect it, there is an enormous amount of bars with young musicians playing country music inside of them, and more shops which sell Stetson hats and Cowboy boots than I have ever seen. You don't have to be a major country music fan to enjoy the city of Nashville, because the city itself is beautiful and you can, as we did, spend time by the river and look at the skyline and enjoy the great view. We stayed in Nashville for three days and left on Thursday morning to go to Chattanooga; unfortunately it rained the entire time and Annika was feeling sick, so we took time to relax in our beautiful hostel and read our books, which, luckily, weren't for class but simply for enjoyment. This morning we hit the road again to go to our beautiful cabin we rented near the Smokey Mountains to hopefully go hiking and enjoy the time in the middle of the forest.  Our drive was somehow exciting since we didn't have cell service for most of the time and we lost our GPS for about an hour in the middle of the Cherokee National Forest, but we stopped several times to admire the breathtaking views. Finally, we arrived at our cabin! It's raining today, but it's supposed to be sunny tomorrow so I'm hoping for some good weather to go hiking or even renting a canoe if Annika is feeling better.
We'll stay in our cabin until Sunday and I'll keep you posted regarding more adventures or interesting people we will encounter. I took way too many pictures to post all of them, but I wanted to give you some impression of what our road trip looks so far. I'm sure there will be a lot more funny and interesting stories at the end of our journey, but right now it is time to cook some dinner and enjoy the peaceful environment of our cabin.