Tourist In My New Hometown: January Edition

My slowest month of the year, a time for relaxation and planning for the year to come. No bakery stuff, no pop-ups, no gardening. So what on Earth did I do all month? Let's chat about it.

I didn't do as much traveling since I had no work planned for this month. You see, I don't really have a day off from September through the second week of December. So I plan to take January off every year to relax, plan, and explore a bit before work starts back up again.

The goal for 2024 is to build my online pop-ups so I can have a bit more freedom, that way I can explore more of East Tennessee and share it with all of you.

Something that threw a wrench in EVERYONE'S plans this month was the eight day long snow storm. I'm still seeing half melted snow at the time I'm writing this. So unfortunately, that basically cut the entire month a bit short for everyone.

Click the links below to find what you're interested in!

Places I Visited

Coffee & Food

Places I Visited

Most of the places I visited were during my walks. My mom and I started this goal of walking three times a week back in November so we've found some go-to routes as well as cool connections we never thought of before! Here's a list of everywhere I've been in January:

• Frothy monkey (For avocado toast & peppermint tea, a pretty good breakfast spot downtown)

• UT Campus (A great place to walk around when there are no students, it's a bit overwhelming when they are there)

• Main Event in Cedar Bluff (Fun Dave & Busters-ish spot, arcade, bowling, pool, bar, etc.)

• Maryville Greenway (Awesome walking/biking path!)

• Cherokee Farms (One of my favorite walking spots)

• Fort Dickerson Park (Basically hiking a hill five minutes from downtown Knox with a swimming quarry)

• Angry Dumpling (One of my new favorite spots in South Knox!)

Thanks to the ten inches of snow we received, I spent an entire week in my house watching a lot of Netflix. The seasonal sadness hit me hard when I became so used to sunshine and warmth. Spending a week in snow and what my family calls Portland weather? No thank you.

Angry Dumplings really saved the week by being one of the only restaurants open during the snow storm, serving up the most amazing wonton soup I ever tasted. The owners live around Farragut, forty minutes away from their South Knox restaurant. I'm not sure how they managed but my mom and I were extremely grateful for homemade soup and dumplings. I also love getting their Thai Tea! Being one of the only bubble tea spots I know that has non dairy milk options made my day.

Coffee & Food

As mentioned above I at a lot of Angry Dumpling's Wonton Soup. I walked six miles in the snow both times to go eat this soup, that's how much I loved it. Highly recommend this spot.

I haven't explored a whole lot of new spots. This month had a lot of home cooking instead. My kid brother started cooking a giant pot of spaghetti every other week that tastes awesome, and really helped me out as well. Usually my dad and I are the sole cooks in the family but he's back in my hometown right now dealing with some contracts, so it's been mainly me handling food. This included a recipe my mom wanted me to test out, a dairy free chicken pot pie. Which I must say was absolutely amazing.

Whenever we went out walking or to eat the three of us hit up some favorites instead of exploring too much this month. Here's some snapshots of all the coffee and food I recorded this month:

I hope you liked this more chill month, February will have a bit more happening and hopefully a lot less snow. Seriously... I moved to the South for warmth and sunshine, not a week and a half of snow. At least it wasn't like Portland's annual ice storms, I'll take pretty snow powder over that any day. Until next time!