The game continues
This is a great place to have a sweet tooth. There are more candy stores and fudge factories here than in the entire Bay Area, I should think. Add in a 15 or 20 places to get ice cream, frozen yogurt or frozen custard. Then there are the restaurants, which make everything sweet.
We had dinner tonight at Peddlers, which is considered one of the best places in town. It’s a steakhouse, they offer big slabs of beef, even to the point that a man comes to your table with entire loins and strips and offers to cut off as much as you want right then and there. I had the trout, which is local (they say), but I’m a contrarian. Like many of the places here, it offers a salad bar, so you can make you own enormous salad–and many of the items on that are sweet, including a fruit salad, corn, carrots and peas.
Ice tea is served already sweetened, really really sweetened, unless you ask for it otherwise.
The rolls they brought to the table were sweeter than some pastries I have had. You get your choice of side dishes, and we all chose the sweet potato casserole, which is mashed sweet potatoes, butter, brown sugar and a bit of coconut to add that last little bit of sweetness. It’s like a dessert. If The French Laundry would add it to the menu the Michelin people would have to add another star to their rating.
The tournament is huge. This photo is a composite of 5 shots I took trying to get everything in:
The room is a huge rectangle, distorted by the photo process.
Here’s a single shot of the busiest end of the room–these are just the KO’s for teams with over 4000 points. There is another huge room on the other side of the far wall for the newer teams.
Our guys were on the far side, at the table with all the lights.
I wandered around this afternoon and took some photos. G’burg isn’t a bastion of class and style:
Hard to believe anyone over the age of 7 would want to wear these.
The politics in Tennessee are somewhat to the right of home:
Nope, don't miss him yet. Notice he's completely missing from this years races. Nobody quotes him, nobody wants his endorsement.
There are some cool people on the street, though:
Not just anybody could carry this look out this well.
There are things I don’t understand:
5D? Isnt' that two more D's than there are?
This is the display in front of the 5D shooting gallery. Why is the donkey riding the man? What does this mean? Does it make you want to go in?
Still, weird and tacky as G’burg can be, it’s a beautiful spot in the mountains, very green and lovely. It was raining lightly this afternoon, and the colors just popped off these rose growing on the main street:
Nothing to complain about here, it was lovely.
Oh yes, the bridge. I guess I have to get around to that. We started a new KO this afternoon, roundly trouncing some very nice people. In the second match, after dinner, we were ahead by 8 at the halfway point but lost by 16 in the second half. There were 3 swing boards where we could have saved the event, but we didn’t, and tomorrow morning we’ll start the morning KO’s and then at 1:00 we’ll start another prime time event. Meanwhile, I think I’ll have something sweet.
Totally Unauthorized 