Museums, Music City & Mountains, Oct 18-29
Visits to the MCA, Art Institute and CBOE floor in Chicago either side of a trip to Nashville, the Smoky Mountains and Blue Ridge Mountains with Mum and Dad.
The Museum of Contemporary Art had an exhibition entitled Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967.
The Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville.
More architectural delights.
Honky tonk bars line Broadway in 'Music City'.
It just had to be Bourbon - an American whiskey named after Bourbon County in Kentucky.
Then back to Broadway...
...where we discovered fantastic band Albania Mania.
Waiting for our car outside our hotel housed in an old bank in the city centre.
On leaving Nashville our first stop was the home of Andrew Jackson, 7th US President, who had been a Tennessee Senator and Supreme Court Justice.
Then we stretched our legs in the small town of Cookeville.
The depot was built in 1909, nearly 20 years after the first locomotive passed through on the Nashville-Knoxville Railroad.
Mike goes looking for lunch at a saloon in Knoxville.
Wedding chapel and fall display in the popular vacation resort of Gatlinburg, where we spent the night. (Did you know that 90 percent of the pumpkins produced in the US are grown in Illinois?)
Smokey Mountains National Park where we crossed from Tennessee into North Carolina.
Near the village of Cherokee we joined the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The Blue Ridge Parkway - "America's favourite drive" - winds for 469 miles through the Appalachian Mountain range in North Carolina and Virginia.
We stayed in Asheville where Mike enjoyed the Green Man ales.
Another jaunt along the (very misty) parkway before heading to Charlotte for our flight home.
Mike's colleague, Mike Menslage, kindly showed us around the floor of the Chicago Board and Options Exchange.
Outside the Art Institute on Michigan Ave.
Mum continued enjoying her beer right up until the end!
