This is where we decided to go once we had to push South Dakota off for a few months, and it was a great choice. I don't know why I got it in my head to come here recently, but it did, and since it's seven and a half hours away from Chicago, it's really not that tough a drive. Nick came to pick me up after work, and after grabbing dinner to wait out rush hour traffic, we drove down to Indianapolis. As Chicago -> Indy is maybe the most boring drive I've ever done, especially fairly often, it was kind of nice to be able to do most of that in the dark where we weren't sighing as we passed yet another field of absolutely nothing. (I'm sorry, Indiana. Illinois is a boring drive, too.) Nick booked a decent hotel there, and we could sit down and actually plan what we were going to do in Nashville. Also, to book the hotel we're staying in tonight.
So, I have a system for looking at hotels. Rather than trying to get in the city where prices were higher, go about half an hour out. I go on Priceline, sort by price and go past one and two stars, because after a couple horrible experiences in one star hotels it's worth the extra $20 to stay somewhere that I feel I can sleep without contracting something. Usually you can find a good three star hotel for around $80, which split two ways isn't bad. Last night there were issues there, which was weird because I'd looked up prices in Nashville before and didn't have a problem. Then Nick remembered seeing something about the Walking Dead Walker Stalker convention, which was probably driving up prices. So let this be a lesson, kids: watch out for Walking Dead conventions. So I spent more than I wanted to on tonight's hotel but it's a good hotel so I'm not going to complain too much.
We started out around 8 am and got to be all nostalgic because the way we took through Indiana was the way we used to take to get to Cincinnati. Cincinnati was also my previous experience with Kentucky, because a) I had to drive people back and forth to the Cincy airport which is in Kentucky (don't ask me, I just work here), and b) the first time I went to Cincinnati I followed the signs for Cincinnati and accidentally ended up in the wrong state. But driving through Kentucky on purpose is super pretty. And being stuck in Chicago where it keeps casually snowing whenever it feels like it, it was so nice to see actual spring in the form of flowers and blossoms on trees along the highway.
Also, a note: Indianapolis is messed up when it comes to time zones, so we spent the night in Eastern. Which means when you get back through Kentucky and then Tennessee in Central, it kind of screws up your timing on getting to the hotel. But on the way there we saw a sign for the Andrew Jackson Hermitage, and (not for the first time ever) I said, "Wanna go to (this historical site on the way to the hotel)?" and Nick said sure, so we went. It's $20 for the basic tour, which gives you access to the very pretty grounds and the mansion, which is a semi-guided tour. There's no photography in the mansion or there'd be a lot of pictures here, but outside the house was another story. There were a lot of smaller buildings to check out, though at parts it was sort of uncomfortable? At one point inside the mansion someone asked how many servants there were to deal with the twenty guests per day the docents would talk about, and when we got to the slaves' houses it sort of felt like a slap, like, oh right, we're in the South and of course there weren't servants, and we're somewhere were people might casually call slaves that. In the museum at the house there was also a small thing on how the Native Americans sided with the British in the War of 1812 because they thought the British could protect them from land-hungry Americans, which... yeah. There's something about certain areas of the South, where they kind of shock you by acknowledging that this country's based on some pretty truly awful stuff, but I think it's good that they do make you face it.
Still, I definitely recommend it as a place to stop, and one of those things that seems typical of a Nick and Natalie Trip. And by then we hadn't eaten since getting breakfast at the hotel before leaving, and we were getting hungry. We decided to stop at the Steak and Shake nearby just to get something cheap, and we should have known there was a problem when we waited about five minutes before anyone even acknowledged that we were waiting to be seated. It was another five minutes or so before our server came over to get our orders. And then we waited for twenty minutes without drinks, without any acknowledgement that we were waiting. There were people waiting to be seated, several tables that hadn't been cleared, and no one there was in any sort of rush to get anyone through. The guy at the next table must've seen we looked bored because he told us that they'd gotten in nearly an hour before and were just about to leave before they finally brought the food over. I give servers a ton of credit; they work hard even though no one thinks they do, they don't get paid enough because they have to rely on tips but there are a lot of asshole tippers out there who don't think about things like that, you have to deal with the public all day, it's stressful... But this was getting to be above and beyond, and we were considering just leaving, but Nick gave us another five minutes to wait and see if they'd bring anything over. One waitress came over to ask if we'd ordered, we said we'd been waiting twenty minutes, and she walked off looking frazzled. A couple minutes later, we heard a woman holding an apron yelling about someone not getting a break all day and how dare they yell at her. When it didn't seem like we were getting any more drama or food, we left a restaurant for the first time ever. I'd have felt worse about it, but on the way to the car we saw our waitress on her way back from her car, sooooo I have a feeling one way or another someone lost their job today based on the yelling. We found a Shoney's near the hotel, where everytime she came over to take our order we got to be like, "But no seriously she looks just like Daisy Ridley," and where we got to reminisce about our childhoods when Shoney's was Wag's, so I'm not mad at that detour. It's also the only real food I ate the whole day, oops.
I will say, too, that aside from the workers at Steak and Shake, everyone we met down here has been amazingly friendly. People had no problem talking to us in lines or at bars or whatever, but it wasn't really intrusive. It was them trying to be helpful about something. We heard the word "y'all" about four hundred thousand times, and I'm not sure that's an exaggeration, but since I've been y'alling for years it was nice to hear it without people looking at me like I said something weird. The girl who managed the line to get into the Andrew Jackson house was two weeks removed from Texas, and I'm pretty sure she said it in at least half her sentences. If you bump into someone on the street, there's a lot of sincere "Oh, I'm so sorry!"s that happen. I definitely dig Southern charm.
When researching Nashville I decided I wanted to go to the Parthenon, which I hadn't even known existed. It's an art museum that's a copy of the actual Parthenon in Greece, complete with the Athena statue. I was dumb and didn't check the hours of operation, so we got there about half an hour after it closed. But we got to walk around there and Centennial Park, watching people walk their dogs and taking group prom and wedding pictures. Seriously, it is a huge prom location, apparently.
But it was a good stop, and then we drove ten minutes away to downtown Nashville, where we paid way too much for parking. In line at the Hermitage two women from West Virginia had warned us about the convention crowd (we saw no one and had no problems there) and the parking, where they undersold it and we paid $27, but they don't advertise the prices until you've parked and have to pay, which sucks. But it was worth it, because downtown Nashville is pretty great. We got there early enough that we didn't have to worry about crowds yet, so we could wander around some. We stopped in at a coffee and ice cream bar where the line was out the door most of the night, and stopped to look at cowboy boots at one of the many, many, many boot stores around. It's also a small enough area that all the places we'd talked about stopping and finding maybe on the way home tomorrow, we found by accident. We found the pedestrian bridge, which is a great spot to stop and take pictures, even though we only crossed halfway before going back downtown.
We also walked around for a bit trying to find a good bar. I'm sure there are plenty, but it was just late enough now that the crowds were getting bigger, and while we tried to get into Legends, it was already standing room only, and several other places were just loud, and I like being able to have a conversation with someone I'm hanging out with. So we found Rippy's across the street from Legends, and that was a good call. There's live music at pretty much all the bars there, but we found somewhere not too loud where the band played a lot of different music with a country twang, the drinks weren't completely ridiculous, and while I didn't think my whiskey sour had much alcohol in it it kicked in when we were on the way back to the hotel. Now, if I was out with my friends I'd have had more and probably insisted on checking out more places, but it's different when you're with your brother and also we have to get on the road early tomorrow for an eight hour drive home, so we were lame and called it an early night.
In short (after a very long post), Nashville, I love you, and I will be back.
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