This weekend we traveled to Tennessee to walk with the Asheville Amblers walking club in Oak Ridge and Gatlinburg.
About a year ago I read (well, actually, I think I listened to the audio book) "The Girls of Atomic City" by Denise Kiernan. It is a fascinating account about women who came to a newly created, secret, secured city, not found on any map to work on a project that they were told would help win World War II. Though housed in dormitories and prefab houses in makeshift neighborhoods, they shared stories of their lives with one another, but were forbidden to talk about any aspect of their work. The secret city eventually came to be called Oak Ridge, TN, after their mission succeeded. The work at Oak Ridge involved extracting the radioactive uranium that was used to create the atom bomb. At it's height, the government city had a population of 75,000 people.
Well, the book piqued my curiosity and so, when the Ambler trip was announced, I was eager to go and see what was left of the secret city.
Our first stop was the American Museum of Science and Energy.
At the museum, we signed up for the walk and then viewed a short orientation movie about Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Project.
Because the skies were heavily clouded with the threat of rain by mid-afternoon, it was decided that we would take our walk immediately so that we wouldn't get soaked.
The walk took us through a large park region which had a number of monuments related to the Manhattan Project. I was particularly taken by this friendship bell which is temporarily sitting on the ground awaiting a new structure from which it will hang.
If you read the plaque above you can see that it is a collaborative project between Japan and Oak Ridge, presented to celebrate the 50th birthday of Oak Ridge.
The photo below gives you an idea of how pretty the park area is, even on a cloudy day.
The rest of our walk, after we left the park, was mostly through rather modest and nondescript neighborhoods. We also walked by a lot of churches.
I couldn't resist taking a picture of this pig car.
The fact that we rushed to get our walk finished as quickly as possible gave us and hour or more to explore the museum, which not only documents Oak Ridge history and related World War II history, but also has a lot of compelling, hands on displays about all of the common sources of energy... atomic, electric, coal, oil and solar.
It was quite fascinating, but we heard that the museum will be moved and likely downsized due to the current administration's lack of support for these national historic sites. What a loss that will be.
Late afternoon we left Oak Ridge and headed to Gatlinburg for dinner, overnight, and a walk on Sunday morning.
I didn't take many photos in Gatlinburg, but it was very busy there... lot's of traffic and lines at every restaurant. We ended up having an excellent dinner at Cherokee Grill... I recommend it!
Since we needed to get back home by early afternoon, we opted to take our morning walk on the main drag of Gatlinburg. So I took the daytime photo of our dinner restaurant then and here's a street scene. The main street of Gatlinburg which is the gateway to the Great Smoky National Park is a couple miles of tourist shops of all kinds... I think we passed at least 6 places where you could buy fudge, at least 4 pancake restaurants, several chain restaurants, many t-shirt and souvenir shops, Ripley's, Star Cars, three indoor mini golf courses, a wax museum, etc., etc. You get the picture. Well, actually, you can get an "old time" picture of yourself or your pet at about a half dozen places, too.
It's refreshing to know that just a couple miles down the road you can enter the national park and be surrounded by nature!
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