Home Tennessee Knoxville, TN: US-70 via Motorcycle

Knoxville, TN: US-70 via Motorcycle

Our stay in Nashville, TN may have been two nights, but it really was only one day. After a day visiting the Johnny Cash Museum and partaking in the nightlife on Broadway, we left the next morning headed to Knoxville.

Knoxville doesn't quite have the name recognition of Memphis or Nashville, but people we talked to said we would like the beer bars, eclectic people, and a slower, but still metropolitan way of life. Knoxville sounded like our kind of town.

But our choice to go to Knoxville was also business, as one of our advertisers on Best Beef Jerky has his manufacturing facility there, and we were to meet him there.

But instead of taking the I-40 to Knoxville, we took the older road, the US-70.

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US-70 roughly follows the I-40, but takes a more meandering course through the hills and valleys of eastern Tennessee, and introduces us to the many smaller towns that had once thrived before the Interstate was put in. Fields of grasses and wildflowers paved the way to groves of oaks, maple, birch, and ash. Old run down buildings of brick still lay in waste against the corporate chains of Subway, Arby's, and Hardee's.

US-70 is not that twisty, but does provide wide sweeping curves that still provide some entertaining riding without drawing much of our skill levels. And the weather seemed cooler on this route than it did when we came from Memphis to Nashville.

Lunch in Smithville consisted of Mexican fare, the first we'd have east of the Mississippi River. And it was OK; not as good as what we'd get in our hometown of San Diego. Los Lobos Mexican Restaurant bills itself as the best restaurant in Smithville, but then again, it's probably the only local eatery aside from national chains.

Overall, the ride to Knoxville via US-70 was a little longer in distance and considerably longer in time, but it's not like we were in a hurry to get there. Cooler weather, better scenery, a more relaxed pace, easy twisties, made for more enjoying riding.