Tennessee Highway

The only downside to the recent trip to Tennessee was how very hard it is to get there from here and vice versa. We went out by US 64, which was fine except that then you have to pass an unnatural barrier in the form of Chattanooga, which currently has hundreds of thousands of semis every day trying to pass through. I've never seen it without a massive traffic jam, but this time it took three hours to get through the city because one of those semis had wrecked on the interstate and was blocking one of only two lanes where it was. 

Ah, beautiful Chattanooga.

The other main route across the line is I-40, which...

The project to repair the eastbound lanes of I-40 washed away in Haywood County during Hurricane Helene is progressing on-time, but the heavy lift has really just begun. When Helene tore through Western North Carolina in 2024, it inundated the embankment supporting the highway so vital to interstate commerce, washing away about a million cubic yards of rock and dropping the eastbound lanes into the water below.... 

state officials and project supervisors said the project is scheduled to be completed — or at least close enough to fully open both the eastbound and westbound lanes — by fall 2028.

That's a solid four years of construction; it's another three-hour crawl through the gorge if you want to go that way. 

We came back through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which can also be quite slow especially when sightseers spot a bear. It's shady and cool, though, especially once you come up towards Newfound Gap.