Ellie the pink elephant, a mascot for The Pink Elephant, Wendy’s Nails and Spa, is a minor celebrity here in Cookeville, TN. We stopped to take a picture with her.

Burgess Falls, Burgess State Park, Sparta, TN is a must see falls if you’re anywhere near here. The 3/4 mile trail takes you along the cliff edge past several smaller waterfalls to a view point high above where you can appreciate the height of the cliffs and the power of the waterfall.

https://tnstateparks.com/parks/burgess-falls

8.7

difficulty: 3

This trip has been a bit of a learning experience. We’ve run out of data on our cell plan for the first time, which makes finding information and directions very slow and frustrating. Then this morning we realized that we’d left an important and irreplaceable item at our hotel the night before. So, we’re driving 3 h 40 min back to get it. Road trips aren’t always going to be perfect. All you can do is turn the tunes up, grab some good road food and roll on with it. We’re taking a different way back and the newly green farmland and mountains are so beautiful.

After a long and tiring drive, we made it to pick up what we’d forgotten in Muscle Shoals and drove on to our hotel in Scottsboro, AL, Quality Inn.

Price: $90/night.