Nashville to Knoxville is about 180 miles and we had a fairly uneventful drive, other than stopping for a hot dog for me at Sonic. I’ve had an obsession with getting something from Sonic since we got to the US and finally we stopped at one – which turned out to be not such a great idea! At Sonic you can only order your meal as a drive-up option and they bring your meal out to your car – the servers are supposed to be on roller-skates but these one weren’t. It also took an absolute age for them to pick up our order, granted it was lunchtime, but I still would have expected it to be a lot quicker than it was. I got a Chicago Dog as they were out of Sauerkraut for the New York Dog – I ask you, how can you be out of sauerkraut, surely it comes in a jar or tin or something that you can stock up on? Anyway, the dog was pretty rubbish and cured me of my Sonic obsession, though perhaps I should have rather had a burger or one of their shakes that they are famous for.
In Knoxville we checked into the Holiday Inn Downtown which was rather nice and we set off exploring pretty much straight away. Knoxville turned out to be a very walkable (small!) town and after taking the obligatory pictures we went to the market square area which has quite a number of eating and drinking establishments, just the way we like it! We had two very good burgers at The Stock & Barrel and they are well worth trying out as the service and drinks were very good as well. Brian had the usual cheese and bacon while I had The Hurt Locker; both very good with exceptional fries and burger rolls. From there we had a number of places to choose from and after a quick happy hour drink at a not particularly nice bar, we had one for the road on the roof terrace at Preservation Pub, which is a really nice bar. The rooftop patio has a lot of plants and they’ve made a real effort to make it look nice, with the beer taps even coming out of a fake tree. We had an early night as we were both a bit knackered from our exploits in Nashville (line dancing for Brian!).
Biltong and Burger 