I once again woke up before Kyle, something that’s becoming a trend and is different from the start of the trip where Kyle would wake up before me. We went to a Waffle House around 11am for breakfast since there wasn’t a Denny’s nearby, and Waffle House is about the same in a lot of ways anyway. I got a coffee, and when it arrived there was a lipstick mark on the cup! Not a great indication of how well these dishes get cleaned. They were happy to replace it though, and the replacement coffee had no such issues.
After breakfast, we drove a short few minutes to the Kentucky capitol building, where we parked down the street and walked up the hill towards the building. The dome of the capitol is currently under construction which hides some of the beauty of the building, but it was still a really nice capitol. They had a patch of grass out front with a bunch of blue and silver pinwheels, each representing 17 children born in Kentucky in the last year. We also found a large shiny ball statue, which turned out to be a COVID memorial. I’ve noticed that on a lot of statues and such around the states, they explicitly state “No taxpayer funds were used”, because I guess people get really upset about what happens with their taxes if it’s not something that directly benefits them as an individual.
We then took a quick trip to Walmart to pick up a phone mount for the car so that we can mount a phone to the windshield and record street view imagery with Mapillary. Mapillary is an app that when enabled, will take a photo every second or so, including the direction it was taken and the location it was taken at. This information is then used to display directional street view imagery on the map, sort of like Google Street View (but not usually 360 degrees since it uses a phone, but you can get 360 cameras and use them instead).
Once the camera was all set up, we did some DoorDash orders for a little bit. Most were fine, but one order took us 8 miles out into the middle of nowhere, along some super windy roads that required us to slow way down to 5 or 10 miles per hour. Even though it was long, it was still a really nice drive and let us see some of the natural beauty of the area.
After DoorDash we headed to Nashville, the capital of Tennessee. Nashville is a big city, so we knew parking would be a challenge, but I didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was. We got to a parking garage that scans your plate and then lets you pay via the website, which is kind of nice, except that it was $5 per 15 minutes! We were quickly running out of daylight, so we decided we’d just rush the photos and get back to the car as soon as possible.
As we walked to the capitol, I really needed to use the bathroom, so we set our sights on a Starbucks nearby. On our way to it, we passed a bunch of people lining up for food outside, and we quickly realized they were all extras for a movie (based on the signs all over the place indicating it). The Starbucks also seemed to be inside a hotel, and actually wasn’t even open, but we found the bathrooms in the hotel lobby and I was able to use those anyway.
Now, with our light running out and our parking meter rapidly running up, we hurried to the capitol building and got our photos in front of it. It’s a very nice building, with some grand stairs up to the entrance which overlook a great view down into part of the city. I was able to sit on a wall in front of the building for the photo too, which makes it more interesting that just standing in front like usual.
We got our photos and hurried back to the car, but struggled to find the entrance to the parking garage. We ended up finding ourselves in a bus terminal, where we saw an elevator and figured that would get us to the parking garage. We got in, pressed the floor 2 (highest floor) button and waited, but nothing happened. We then realized we were on floor 2, and we could only go down to floor 1. We went down and exited back to the street and just decided to walk up the ramp into the parking garage despite the signs saying “No Pedestrians on Ramp”. Well, if you don’t want us on the ramp, make better signage for the pedestrian entry!
We got ourselves out of downtown (after paying $15 for parking) and headed to a McDonalds to use their wifi and upload our street imagery scans. We walked in to see a woman shouting at the employees asking how long it takes them to remake a McChicken, and then asking for a refund before storming out, never to be seen again. I don’t think I could ever throw such a fit over something like a McChicken, it’s kind of just an embarrassment. Unfortunately, the wifi was way too slow to upload any of our scans, but we hung out for a bit and did some other internet-dependent stuff before getting back on the road.
We wanted to do a bit more DoorDash before calling it a night, so we went to a town called “Bowling Green”, which is quite the unique name for a town. It was a good town for DoorDash since it’s not too large, and it has a college, which is usually a good indicator of young people who don’t want to go get food themselves.
After a good amount of DoorDash, we drove 45 minutes east (and a bit north) to a rest area. We arrived around 2:15am and called it a night pretty quickly.