Disco Chicken and the 1982 World's Fair

What do Disco Chicken and the 1982 World’s Fair have in common?  Read on to find out!

This would have been our official first day of NERT travel if we hadn’t gone to Tennessee first.  But because we did, we spent the day going from the Nashville area to Asheville, North Carolina.

We started the morning early enough to attend worship services in Cookeville, Tennessee, at the Jere Whitson Road church of Christ where we found out that the preacher there not only grew up in the same hometown that DH did, he went to the same congregation that DH’s parents attended (DH had already left home when this fellow was there).  We often find that the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” is easily illustrated when visiting churches while traveling.

From Cookeville, we continued heading east on 1-40 towards Knoxville.  This is the only day where driving on the interstate made more sense than other routes, although we did take the backroads for most of the way from Murfreesboro to Cookeville.  We stopped for gas at a Costco about 15 minutes west of Knoxville.  The gas was $3.35 per gallon, best price so far.

Several weeks ago, our niece had mentioned to me a restaurant in Knoxville called Disco Chicken and Donuts.  It is a fully gluten-free food stand in the Kern's Bakery building which now functions as a food hall (glorified food court without the rest of the mall).  Since finding fully gluten-free restaurants is hard when traveling (and even when not), I wanted to try this!

On the way to the restaurant, which is right near UT-Knoxville,  DH noticed the big gold Sunsphere that was from the 1982 World’s Fair that was held in Knoxville.  We have a glass from that World’s Fair but I never remember that the reason we have it is that DH actually went to the World’s Fair when it was in Knoxville 44 years ago!  So that was a treat for him to see the Sunsphere again!

So about that chicken and those donuts!  It’s been so long since I’ve been able to have fried chicken tenders that actually taste good and are gluten-free.  We each got a plate with two chicken strips and fries and a donut hole.  It also came with coleslaw, but I was able to trade-in my coleslaw for an extra donut hole (and the nice guy at the counter actually gave me two extra).  This was a lot of food, but we took half the chicken and donuts to go to have for dinner later on.

While the donuts were my favorite bite(s), DH said he thought the best part of the meal was the gluten-free sweet tea (haha).  And yeah, it was really good sweet tea – after all, we were in the south!

After a late lunch we continued working our way across Tennessee.  It was new territory for me and I was thinking about the destruction the Asheville area had from the storms a few years ago. I wasn’t sure where that all was, so now I want to go look it up.  We took a quick rest stop at the North Carolina welcome center before making it into Asheville.  There was a really pretty yellow flower there. #flowersmakemehappy

Oh, the answer to the question of what do Disco Chicken and the 1982 World’s Fair have in common?  They were both in Knoxville.  And if we hadn’t had to go to Tennessee a few days ago, we wouldn’t have had gluten-free chicken and donuts nor been reminded of DH’s trip to the World’s Fair.  (I sent a picture to our sons and told them to ask their dad about that trip some time.)

~ Cindy D.