Yesterday we bailed on Steve's Cataloochee backpack. We were the last to do so...Bill and Jim had already canceled do to illness and other reasons. Our canceling freed Steve to participate in SMHC's 18-mile death march day hike and John and I free to play.

This morning we headed downtown to the craft and farmers market on Market Square. This is the second summer for the local market and I am disappointed. In our travels we have happened upon some wonderful downtown Saturday morning markets (most recently in Missoula, MT) with lots of locally grown food, crafts and activities. Our city has a lot of marketing to do to make the Market Square farmers market even somewhat successful. What gives Knoxville, this is another great opportunity to draw people downtown!!

After purchasing leaf lettuce, organically grown sweet peas, wild blueberries and a loaf of Gran John's Ho-made Original potato bread (baked by the daughter and granddaughter of the owners of The Wilsons restaurant in Townsend, TN- now closed), we walked across the mall to the Market Square Kitchen (formally the Soup Kitchen). We grabbed an outside table and settled into a breakfast of eggs, toast, coffee and juice. The food was very "diner" ish, the service very slow and the coffee only okay, but we had a great time sitting outside, watching the bits of tourist traffic that floated in from downtown hotels.

After breakfast, we dropped our purchases in the car and strolled on Gay Street, pressing our faces against the windows of the old S & S Cafeteria (soon to be a movie theater), the empty Kimballs' Jewelry (thumbs down to Kimballs for removing the Hope clock when they moved to Bearden), the Fowlers Furniture building and others. The interiors of the buildings are in various stages of decay, their grandeur fading with time. The city is working on "deals" to rehab or replace. We talked about how nice it would be to buy a condo in one of the many buildings under renovation and how much we would miss our yard care if we did so (just kidding about the yard :-).