Bell Buckle Travel Guide

As you've no doubt noticed from the pictures, the restaurant in town is the Bell Buckle Cafe, which sponsors just about everthing, features great pie (pronounced 'pah'), and is home to great live music with some of the biggest names in country music. Not bad for a little hole in the wall.

Now some of you might well ask: Where the blazes is Bell Buckle? Well, sit yourself down, and I'll tell you.

It's about halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga, right off I-24. Since the town has a population of only 463, it doesn't really show up on maps. You can find it on Yahoo! though.

Bell Buckle (and other small towns in Middle Tennessee) is just a little place full of friendly folk, good food, fun times, and shirts for sale. Buy a shirt -- just don't buy a torn Def Leppard tank top. Also, don't make fun of how we Tennesseans believe that the g in -ing is silent. Running is pronounced Runnin. We know the g is there; we just don't pronounce it, much as you don't pronounce the k in knight. We're not lazy, we're grammatically correct!

Rednecks (homo adustus). Rednecks are natives of the South who somehow missed the boat on Darwinism. This picture really demonstrates some of the more salient qualities of this peculiar species. First, note the tube top on the mother of this family. Clearly, such a woman would not normally wear a tube top, ceratinly not in 1995. Yet on a redneck, it's OK.

Now turn your attention to the elder brother. Note well the Def Leppard T-shirt, torn along the sides and in the front. This is definite redneck fashion. The younger brother suffers from the same malady, just without the hair-rock reference.

What's the deal with rednecks? This sub-species have given an extremely black eye to the South and to its people. Not all Southerners are rednecks, in fact, very few Southerners are rednecks. Look for these features, and you will successfuly distinguish between the two.

Wherever this guy got his hat is clearly a tourist trap. He looks a bit confused, doesn't he?

Favorite thing: Bell Buckle is a great place for a Moon-Pie Festival. A small village composed of equal parts tobacco farmers and prep school students, Bell Buckle possesses a real sense of fun and lack of shame that makes it the envy of larger metropoles. It also has a nice open central area that's perfect for a party.