Our Weekend Trip.

We were looking for some cheap entertainment this weekend and, since gas is now relatively inexpensive and none of us had been to Sewanee since Stacie quit working up there, we made the drive to the ‘mountain’ to have a look around.

We stopped at “The Big Rock” on the way up.
This thing is some king of natural sandstone outcropping right on the side of Highway 41. It’s surrounded on the other sides by dense primeval forest and a sheer cliff.

Many years ago someone added some masonry steps on the side so you can climb the thing with relative ease and look down into the valley. I remember doing this a couple of times as a kid so we stopped to let our kids have the same experience. Fortunately they’ve scrubbed a lot of the graffiti off and generally cleaned the area up a lot in the ensuing years.

The kids got a big kick out of climbing the rock – especially Tad - who started crawling around on all fours, saying things like ‘my precious’ and ‘it hurt’s us’ over and over again. He was a little too exited about the rock for my tastes because, even though it’s only about 30 feet or so above the roadway on the front, the rear of this formation is hundreds of feet above the valley below. So I held on to my little ‘Gollum’ most of the time we were up there.

Here's a view from the top of the rock looking toward the valley, down to the highway ,

and the rock from the back:

We moved on from there and drove out toward the Templeton Library, passing St. Mary’s Convent,

and on to the Natural Bridge preserve.

We hiked down to the ‘bridge’ – another stone formation

– and the kids and I climbed across. Stacie wouldn’t do it, though.

There were some other folks there and one young guy not only went across but climbed down into the cave below and was scaling the side of the bridge as we left. My son looked on enviously. Stacie said, “Don’t even think about it!”

We went back to the Templeton Library and self-toured the grounds. I’ve never seen it up close though I can see it as a speck from my house on a clear day.

We saw the statue of Sir John Templeton himself and pretty much just walked around the building saying ‘wow’ repeatedly. Tad wanted to go in a ‘check out a book” Shelby punched him and said “It’s not that kind of a library – DUH!” She was right – the library is actually a repository for John Templeton’s extensive papers. I guess Sir Templeton wrote a lot – five stories worth, maybe?

From the back we had a panoramic view of the Elk River Valley. Tad claimed he could see our house… he couldn’t.




From there we went by the University of the South and headed out to the Memorial Cross. The kids had never been there and it’s been years since I’ve seen it. Again, they’ve cleaned it up a lot. It used to be mainly unattended and at one time had a lot of graffiti on it. Today, it’s a nice memorial for war dead from Franklin County. It’s a beautiful and serene place – a fitting memorial.


You can get a sense of the size of this cross if you look at the bottom of the picture on the left where you can see the tiny figures of my family.
It’s also a check point on the perimeter trail. Which of course Tad wanted to hike – today! We finally got him out of there, but I had to promise to bring him back one weekend and hike the whole 20 mile trail.

Since we were in Sewanee, I said it would be good to see the campus, not realizing it was family day, soccer game day and SACA craft fair day, and apparently a couple of other types of special days, at the university. We crept though the traffic at a snail’s pace but it allowed me to take some pictures from the moving vehicle (which I normally don’t recommend).

We saw several of the dormitories and lecture halls – all of ancient sandstone of course, as well as the new Theology Department facilities, All Saint’s Chapel, Otey Parish (which I didn’t get a picture of, and whatever this is.

Shelby seemed more interested in these than the other sights we'd seen. Tad on the other hand was now bored…



All day he'd been taking in the dense forests, the caves and stone formations interspersed with larger-than-life man-made structures that looked a thousand years old – not to mention all the strange creatures (students) we had run into. All this time a thought had been slowly forming in his over active imagination – something seemed familiar about all this…

It was at this point that he saw a street sign reading “Rivendell” and it all came together for him: “I KNEW it! – We've been in 'Middle Earth' all day!”

Close son, close.