Kevin greeted us at the hotel, having (fortunately) not been given any grief from the hotel manager about our (my) behavior from the previous night, as we had changed rooms 3 times not being able to decide on which room was suitable, bugging him several times late at night in the process. Some rooms had good Wi-Fi but also a strong smell of cigarette smoke, others had no such smell but the Wi-Fi was weak, causing my wife & I to fight a bit--she hates the smell of smoke, but I wanted a good Wi-Fi connection. After much back & forth and me just basically being a jerk (at one point even waking the 3 up "get up, this isn't going to work" etc), I decided to go with what my wife wanted, she can't stand the smell of cigarette smoke at all, especially around our kids, and besides I still could get good Wi-Fi at a not so far away picnic table. (I didn't want to upset the hotel person, but given a choice between upsetting him vs upsetting my wife, she wins.)
After catching up with Kevin the next morning and seeing that it was the same old Kevin (when he was scratching the glass with a coin so as to laugh at the noise it made--hey, you paid for the room buddy, ha ha), we ate breakfast at Hardee's, and the kids loved it when he carved out the Hardee's "star" from the Styrofoam plates. We went to Natural Tunnel State Park (we had seen the sign for it on the way) and then a swinging bridge, Dollar General for Helen some new shoes (hers had broken at Natural Tunnel), our hotel for refreshments (I had gotten a jug Hardee's tea) his house to hike his property, and then at River Place on the Clinch, after which he went to our hotel for awhile to use our Wi-Fi (his home Internet was down due to a recent fire burning up a fiber-optic cable). At his home, his dogs were totally great, the kind I could have next-door to me as a neighbor and almost never find irritating, I could probably even find them fun. The funniest moment of the day--when one of his horses showed his excitement in a most humorous way, ha ha (look at the photo in the gallery). Gallery=102
