A love of history is something my father and I have shared since I was young. He's a self-taught oracle-of-knowledge for all things regarding the Civil War and for as long as I can remember, our family trips revolved around history. While other families went to the beach, we went to battlefields.
My sister was intensely bored by history, she much preferred my father's other love... cars. I, on the other hand, loved history. It was always my favorite subject in school and I was a history major at my first attempt at college. I'm currently in school to become a school counselor, but I've often said that if everything were equal and I could start all over, my dream job would be to be a history professor.
I'm a self-professed presidents nerd (visiting all the presidential birthplaces is also on my nerdy travel list), and I also have a crazy love for the 95 counties in our home state of Tennessee. There's just something about them. I love reading about the cities, communities, and towns in each county and just exactly how those counties came to be. In fact, many years ago, one of the crazy things I did was try to memorize all of the Tennessee counties. I think I got to 64 before I lost interest.
But I never lost my fascination. A couple of years after my twins were born, I had the idea to visit all of the counties, and more specifically take a picture of the main courthouse in each county. My husband thought I was crazy but indulged me. That idea then evolved to "hey, let's do that in a year and blog about it". It got pushed off for several years, but the idea became even more cemented in my mind after my father had a heart attack. I want to spend as much time with him as possible, and driving around the state on this crazy mission of visiting each of the counties seemed like a perfect way to do it.
So, that's what brings us to now. Tomorrow, we begin the first leg in our journey... a trip to the upper part of the Cumberland River.
