This post is more for me than for you, since I treat this blog as much as a personal journal as I do a means of communication.

In 2024 several members of my circle of friends, including myself, celebrate their 50th year on this cursed rock, so to alleviate the constant internal screaming we have put up with all these years we decided to take a group vacation. This was kind of my idea — I don’t know why, I hate traveling — and after discarding several out-of-reach destinations, I threw out the idea of Nashville, Tennessee. Of course, this was a complete left-field idea, as I hold no love for country music, but I had the feeling that Nashville was a big party town and while “50 year-olds in a party town” is not on most people’s bingo cards, I thought that the destination would certain afford us all something to do. Out of our group of 9 people, 5 had only provisioned to stay for 3 days; 4 of us decided to make a week-long vacation of it.

This is our story.

Friday, Oct 4

We had chartered a “limo service” (i.e. a gigantic van) to pick us all up at my house. Everyone arrived via car-pool and had parked in our driveway to minimize the amount of vehicles people had to take in order to consolidate bodies for the trip down to Logan Airport in Boston.

The flight itself was uneventful…smooth, even. The entertainment systems on the seat-backs weren’t working and the crew couldn’t do much about that so my wife spent the 2.5 hour flight re-watching the same 15 minutes of a nature documentary while I was listening to several downloaded podcasts, as has become my airflight past-time.

The weather for Nashville during this week of October was unseasonably warm, with the average temperature in the mid to upper 70F’s.

Our rental vehicle in Nashville was yet another massive van, this one driven by my wife as her father had been a Montreal cab driver in his youth. Her genetics make it so she can drive damn near anything, anywhere.

For the first leg of the trip we rolled into a suburb of Nashville and up to a rental house that claimed to have had several bedrooms and enough room for everyone. While this was technically true, not all of the “bedrooms” contained what we’d generously call “beds” as we might know them. One was a day-bed, for example. Also, there were several bathrooms, but they were oddly situated. The only bathroom on the main floor was available through the master bedroom. One of the basement bathrooms only had a shower…a large, “dress the animals” kind of shower. But there was a nice entertainment room with pool table, and the kitchen was spacious and well apportioned.

That night for dinner we stayed somewhat local, hitting up a well reviewed BBQ bar. Here we learned several things:

1. CBD/THC infused drinks were a thing, and were freely available for purchase around the state.
2. Some/many/most/all people who live in the Nashville area are not actually from there, or from TN, or so it seemed.

Saturday, Oct 5

We learned that our accommodations were located near a pretty active suburban strip, 12th street. Here we found a coffee shop chain called the “Frothy Monkey” a mere 10 minute walk away. On our way there, we saw several restaurants and bars that were (naturally) closed at the time, but which we mentally bookmarked on the off chance we were looking for something to do and didn’t want to drive.

We had only two things on our schedule for Saturday: Columbia Caverns, and a trip downtown later in the evening.

My wife and I had visited Louray Caverns on a trip to Virginia a few years back and were extremely impressed with the tour and presentation. I had an inkling that Tennessee might have caves, and while they did, these weren’t as impressive as the caves in Virginia. However, we all signed up for the shorter tour on account of the fact that the longer, more involved presentation was listed with “has stairs”…yes, we are at the stage of our lives when the presence of stairs is a factor for consideration. I suspect that had we taken the longer, more involved tour then things might have been more interesting. These caves do have one particular claim-to-fame: a massive cathedral-sized cavern which has been set up for concerts and special events. The dome of the ceiling affords some pretty kick-ass acoustics according to our guide, and there’s even a chandelier which was installed back in the mid-20th century.

Our trip down-town had originally been scheduled as a free-form bar-crawl, but one member of the group wanted to do a historical ghost tour instead. A few years back, my family had done a great ghost tour of Williamsburg, VA at midnight and we are still talking about it to this day; unfortunately, the latest tour available to us in Nashville was at 7PM. On the upside, it was the “Booze and Boos” tour which had us stopping at 4-5 different bars and venues on the main strip, Broadway, while our guide told us tales of deaths and hauntings at some well-known places.

Sunday, Oct 6

Sunday was reserved for a visit to the Grand Ole Opry which is a given, a trip to TN’s own Parthenon, and our fancy birthday dinner later that evening.

I have a weird thing about history. I don’t really care what history it is — I’m not hung up on WWII or Prohibition, or any specific point in time — but I do care that history happened, and it’s especially powerful to be where it happened and to see and maybe touch the same things that people have touched whether it was decades ago or 30,000 years ago. Despite having moved from it’s previous location in downtown Nashville in the late 1970’s, the Grand Ole Opry as a concept is the touchstone of an entire sub-culture, and that’s nothing to consider lightly. Our tour took us through the entire facility where we saw the sound stage where several specials and TV shows were recorded (including “Hee Haw” which I will not explain to either the young or the non-Americans), the dressing rooms where celebrities got ready for their performances, even today, and we ended with a stroll across the main stage where performances are held every week, broadcast on the same AM station they have been using since the early 1900’s (this is an age related post, and that statement still hits hard) and online. It was powerfully psychic stuff no matter what I think about country music.

For lunch, one group member really wanted to get food at a place called “Red’s Hot Chicken” which is located on or very near to Vanderbilt University.

Hot chicken is a popular local affectation, and as we were told it started when a wife, angry at her husband for cheating on her, had prepared his chicken dinner with an insane amount of hot spices in the hopes it might kill him or something to that effect. It backfired, as the man survived and loved the preparation. Rather than suffer the fool any longer, the woman codified her recipe, made millions, and left her husband. True? Who cares. The chicken was really damned good.

Red’s was located near the Parthenon and I’m not gonna lie: I was not expecting this to be A Thing, let alone a Thing In Tennessee. It’s apparently a full-sized replica of the original Grecian structure, except “not wrecked”. Inside is a museum that is currently housing a few non-Grecian-related art exhibits, but the real gob smacker is the massive statue of Athena on the second floor. I can now kind of understand the reverence and fear that ancient people had towards their gods because this representation was kind of terrifying.

That night we went to Harper’s Steakhouse. This place actually had a dress code, but when we arrived according to requirements we saw that several patrons had not, with jeans and T-shirts and such. Ah well; we would have dressed up anyway since this was our collective birthday dinner. The food was excellent, and I’ll recap it and other meals in section H, sub-section 1.3, later in the post.

Monday, Oct 7

On Monday, we visited the home of President Andrew Jackson. We (my wife and I) enjoy hitting up museums and historical locations; the Eastern portion of the U.S. is filled with them so we’re usually never without some place to visit.

We had a limited amount of time on this day, however, as 5 members of our troop needed to get to the airport. We took them to the departure gate and said our goodbyes, and the four of us who remained swapped rental cars so we could have something less…land-ark-ish (we got a Nissan Pathfinder that no one took a picture of).

We also moved out of the rented house and into Nashville Proper…in fact, not too far from Harper’s Steakhouse. The place was called Bode and looked like an up-rez’d motel. We had a 2 bedroom suite and the decor was significantly modern. The grounds housed both a coffee shop for the morning, and a bar for the evening and there were two courtyards sporting a large-scale Jenga game and a Cornhole installation. It was also in walking distance of Broadway and down-town Nashville, so it’s highly recommended if you’re looking to stay in Nashville but also kinda not, although being in the city came with a lot of emergency vehicle noises throughout the night.

That evening, we decided to return to Broadway but only got as far as a side-street. We dined at The Stillery, a small American fare bar and restaurant. Our server was overworked, but was still a great sport and was extremely friendly.

Tuesday, Oct 8

Now with fewer party members, we went out to Stillhouse Hallows Falls, a 0.7 mile (thereabouts) nature hike culminating in a pretty decent waterfall basin.

This place was recommended to us by our Ghost Tour Guide Roxanne, who also recommended a “Texas-style BBQ place” nearby called Schaffer’s Meat Market and Texas BBQ. I find it kind of odd that this is a Texas style venue in Tennessee, but I cannot argue with the brisket sandwich that I got. I’ll admit that this place offered the most true-to-expectations Tennessee experience.

On the way back to Nashville, we stopped in Franklin which was apparently the site of a massive battle in the Civil War. While the history was interesting, the real reason we went there was because my friend Other Chris and I wanted to visit the Stable Reserve distillery. As whiskey fans, we were on the “Whiskey Trail” which allowed us to check into participating operations to receive a commemorative poker chip from each place we visited. The cocktails there were fantastic.

That night we braved Broadway once more. My wife and Other Chris’ wife Karen wanted to visit Garth Brooks’ restaurant “Friends in Low Places” because they had watched some kind of documentary about the inception of the place. We hastened up to the second floor where we were able to get a balcony seat to watch the live band playing there that night. After dinner we moved upstairs to the rooftop lounge and spent about an hour or so watching the traffic on the street below.

Wednesday, Oct 9

Wednesday started out with a trip to Belmont University to visit the historic house they have on display there. Belmont is a private Catholic university that specializes in (among a few other things) music — no surprise in Nashville — for careers in both performance and production. The house, however, pre-dates the Civil War and was eventually purchased by two women who started Belmont as an all-women’s college.

On the way back we stopped for lunch at The Greenhouse Bar which is — wait for it — a bar inside a greenhouse. Despite this, the temperature was comfortable, the food was excellent, and the drinks were top-notch.

Later that afternoon we took a stroll across the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge that spans the Cumberland River, because why the hell not. It took us parallel to Nissan Stadium, where some sports shit happens I dunno I don’t follow sports.

Once more into the city for the evening, but this time we did so specifically to hit up two more distilleries on the Whiskey Trail that were located inside Nashville Proper. The first was Big Machine, which had some live music going on. Note that unless specified, almost every venue has live music going on. The second distillery we visited was Nashville Barrel Company which was strictly a distillery, not a restaurant, and had no live music. In fact, we caught the place completely empty that night, which meant we had the sole attention of the bartender who talked us through the offerings and made great recommendations for us based on our preferred flavor profiles. Their award-winning 7 year cask strength whiskey was the best we had on this trip, and went down as smooth as water, making it insanely dangerous. Sadly, we couldn’t get any because it wouldn’t have made it through TSA on the flight home, and because they were only a distillery with a limited license they didn’t distribute outside of their storefront.

Thursday, Oct 10

Thursday was our fun day (not that we weren’t having fun otherwise). We visited the zoo!

The Nashville Zoo is one of the best designed zoos I have visited. A good 80-90% of the walkways are shaded and the animal enclosures are all nicely designed to minimize the visibility of the boundaries while maximizing the space for the animals. The kangaroo exhibit was amazing as there was no barrier between people and animals — although we had to stay on the path, the guide we talked to said that the animals would frequently mix with the visitors. Unfortunately, we arrived during a rather hot portion of the morning and all of the residents were laying down for a mid-morning nap.

When my wife and I went to Colorado last year, we went to a high-tech mini-golf place called PuttShack. We lucked out in that one had recently opened in Nashville, so we booked a time and introduced our friends to this bar-golfing hybrid location.

PuttShack’s courses use microchipped balls to identify each player. There are four courses and groups are assigned to one 9-hole course for their reservation. Each course has a theme; in a lame twist of fate, we got the same theme in Nashville we did in Denver — games and gaming. Some of the holes we played through included a trivia hole where we had to putt into a zone which dictated a category, and then sink the putt into one of two holes, each representing a right and wrong answer to a trivia question. There was a Tetris themed hole, a Pac-Man themed hole, and a basketball themed hole as well. In the end, Karen won the round on account of having scored two holes-in-one, while her husband came in last place.

We had planned on segueing to a pinball arcade elsewhere in the city, but as luck would have it, there was one right next to PuttShack called Pins Mechanical Company!

Our friends actually belong to a local pinball league that meets up every Tuesday, and my wife joined as well; the venue where the games are played is very claustrophobic and there are a lot of people, so I do not attend, but Pins Mechanical featured several pinball machines ($1.00 per play), many classic arcade games (all free to play, and Chris and I went through the entirety of TMNT as a result), and other family-friendly games like Skee-Ball. Of course, they had a bar, and their version of the Godfather with the addition of a caramel sauce was mind-blowing.

Since we had taken a late lunch, no one was really hungry so while our wives stayed in an watched horror movies (tis the season!), Chris and I went downstairs to Bode’s on-site bar, the Sidebar.

The whole place had been seasonally renovated with a Halloween theme (or “popup” as the on duty bartender referred to it as) as you can kind of see in the picture. It was kind of dark so I didn’t get any more pictures. It was also pretty deserted, with only one couple hanging out on one of the couches. They had food delivered to them there, which should indicate the vibe of the place. Later, two young women arrived who were dressed for what I assume was some kind of Halloween party, but not a costume party. They sat next to us so I overheard that they were from Nebraska or Oklahoma or somewhere like that. While I get that those states are more local to TN than they are to NH, it’s still a bit weird to me to be bumping into people from all over instead of just seeing their license places on the highway back at home.

Friday, Oct 11

We were heading home on Friday. Our flight wasn’t until 6PM, and the car didn’t have to be back until 3PM, so we killed a little time packing up our belongings, and then decided to head out for breakfast. We hoped to get into the nearby Pancake Pantry which was only one block away, but there was a line that extended down the street so we kept on walking until we ended up at Another Broken Egg Cafe.

On a whim, we later found ourselves at the Lane Automobile Museum in part because it was close the airport. I’m not much of a car guy, but the automobile has a really weird family tree so it’s fun to see the dumb shit people tried to stick wheels to.

One interesting section of the collection featured racing cars, and the placards for each model on display listed which video games the car appears in. In fact, several of the cars in the museum were rare enough that game companies have traveled to this museum to scan those exact vehicles for rendering, meaning that when you drive a specific car in, say, Forza Horizon, you are driving that specific car!

Our flight back was a bit better than the outbound one. The entertainment systems were functional, but there was a bit more turbulence this time. Although I tried listening to my podcasts, I spent most of my time ghost-watching another seat where the occupant was watching Avengers: Infinity War which I hadn’t seen in quite a while. We landed at Logan, which was oddly deserted except for a few travelers and two mice who were just running around like they owned the place. Welcome home!

Random Thoughts

Traveling with a group

On paper, this sounds great: get a bunch of your best friends and get everyone to leave their jobs and concern behind for a few days. In practice, it can be painfully disappointing. The difficulty is in trying to be all things to everyone so that everyone feels like they are participating. In the time allotted, everyone may want to see or do something specific, so making sure that everyone gets their needs met can be hard if the time is limited.

On the other hand, we learned that even when people get to do what they want to do, they can end up unhappy, like if they really do not want to do something that someone else does want to do, or if they didn’t get to do something that they wanted to do. Not everyone has to be attached at the hip at all times, and some people might be OK just hanging back while others do something else, but those are expectations that need to be met up front. Everyone must speak up about their objectives and their limits, and everyone has to be OK and a bit flexible.

Also, depending on how you structure it, paying for things can quickly become a disaster. We had expenses such as flights, accommodations, car rentals, food both in-house and off-site, admission fees, and ancillary expenses such as booze and snacks. It’s important that a plan be made before the trip to cover the most expensive bases and to track who paid what to whom and when. We are learning this the hard way as we’re going to have to settle accounts after the fact, sometimes without a solid record of who has paid and who has not.

Food

The food we had in Nashville was almost universally excellent.

• Hot chicken is amazing, and there are several takes on the concept. Red’s was the best we had. Supposedly there’s a local chain called Hattie B’s that all of the locals praised and which was near our rented house, but one member of the group wanted Red’s specifically so we didn’t get to go to Hattie’s.
• Our birthday dinner was also excellent. I had the filet which was cooked to perfection. My wife’s sea bass was the best she’d ever had, she said. Sides were family style, meaning they were shared among the diners, and the one side we got that I side-eyed originally, the creamed corn brulee, was so good that I’m thinking about it right now and it’s making me sad I won’t get to have it again.
• I had the Bourbon Street Pancakes at Another Broken Egg and those were great. The bacon down in Tennessee is crispy as a rule, which is not the case here in New England. Sad fact: Tennessee does not have natural maple syrup. When asked for and told that they only had store-grade syrup, Karen jokingly called it “pancake varnish” which I think made our server angry since she didn’t come back until she dropped off the bill.
• Smoked brisket sandwich from Shaffers did not disappoint, so props to Ghost Tour Roxanne for the recommendation.
• On the list of Most Disappointing: Garth Brooks’ place. We got a “tower of tenders” which was a pretty large two-tiered container of hot chicken tenders and french-fries with about 20 different dipping sauces. The tenders were marginally OK, and the “hot” was a dusting of some generic Cajun spice. The fries were over-salted, though some inherited the spice from the tenders and those few were pretty good. I guess sticking with less hyped, smaller restaurants is absolutely the way to go.

Whiskey

Both Other Chris and I tried several different whiskeys and whiskey cocktails throughout the week, and I don’t recall any that could even be considered sub-par. Of course, Tennessee is considered to be a whiskey and bourbon epicenter, so no one should be surprised, and the only disappointment was that we couldn’t have possibly hit all 28 stops on the Whiskey Trail app during our time. Other Chris bought a bottle of Stable Reserve Coffee Cream Liqueur at the airport post-TSA, and it’s insanely good. I ran out of money and had no room in my carry on to buy anything, so imagine my sad face as you read that sentence.

Entertainment

I had been told that if you like live music Nashville is the place to go. Yes, the majority of it is country, but country music in 2024 spans a pretty wide selection of styles, really. And not all performers are performing known songs, or country music at all. I had also been told that people even performed at breakfast places, and…well, that’s not a misleading statement. I found myself disappointed when a restaurant or cafe was pumping out “canned” music when there was all of this live talent just lying around.

City Life

Considering that I had wildly chose Nashville for our trip thinking that we would have plenty of places to go to hang out each evening while listening to live music, I can’t complain that Nashville didn’t deliver. The problem is that Nashville got the memo and asked someone to hold it’s beer.

On Saturday night, we took an Uber from our suburb because we had the massive van and knew we wouldn’t be able to park it anywhere. That turned out to be both prescient and a blessing because there was a hockey game at the Bridgestone Arena and a concert going on at the same time. This effectively shut down all roads leading to the area we were trying to reach; our driver circled the area over and over, trying to get us as close to our destination as possible, but police were throwing up road-blocks right in front of our car in some cases. It didn’t help that moments before we started our journey, a Local College Sports Team beat another College Sport Team, and then this happened:

There were so many people out and about that night that it was almost impossible to do anything other than keep moving. The only way to avoid getting carried away by the stream of people was to side-step onto another street or into a business. On the other hand, getting above the crowd to one of the many, many rooftop bars or other levels with open windows affords a great view of the masses removed from their affect.

From my personal experience, then, despite the manic bustle, people were pretty OK. I don’t recall seeing, hearing, or experiencing anger or physical altercations on the street. Broadway is like a mini-Vegas Strip, so there’s a lot to see which I think helps slow people down. Yes, some people just stopped where they were, to get their bearings, to talk to members of their groups, or to reverse direction before checking to see who is behind them, but overall people just kept moving at a manageable pace.

As you might expect, the weekend night-time crowd is pretty much all young people. Painfully attractive, energetic, fit young people. Nashville seems to be a gravitational center for bachelorette parties, and the required uniform for such is that every member of the party wears a cowboy hat, and the bride-to-be gets to have a veil streaming from hers. These groups were overwhelmingly the only ones I saw wearing cowboy hats, though, which countered my expectations, but cowboy boots were a staple across the board, specifically with women in sundresses or jean shorts. I also didn’t realize that cowboy boots had evolved from the utilitarian footwear we know to at least a dozen derivatives, styles, heights, and levels of sparkle. It was almost comically “basic” how this style was so prevalent. With so many young people around, though, and since we were there to celebrate our 50th birthdays, I had never felt more out of place, unrecognized, or unwanted than the weekend nights we ended up downtown.

During the day, Broadway is a totally different place. The lights are still on, but the crowds are completely different. While the younger crowds are taking the week off to nurse whatever damage they did to themselves Thursday through Saturday, the middle aged and older crowds take over. Music is still on tap, though the acts may be more subdued and the volumes turned down slightly. While weekend nights make navigating the strip and surroundings pretty difficult, anyone who has walked a city behind a group of elderly tourists knows that it’s a toss up between which situation is objectively worse.

Nashville, despite its promise for many musically inclined or musically adjacent hopefuls, isn’t a city of dreams for some. Homeless is up front and center both downtown and around the periphery. I saw from my hotel balcony as security roused a man who was sleeping in a doorway across the street. We were cussed out by a woman in the park who approached us for money. A woman asked that if she sang us a song, could we spare some change? I admit that I live a privileged life in both circumstance and location that I don’t know how to deal with these kinds of situations as I am rarely exposed to them.

Expectations

I’m not going to lie, and it’s going to make me sound like an asshole, but I was expecting more…South from my trip to Tennessee. I suppose that as a Mecca, Nashville is going to be more cosmopolitan than expectations might allow. We ran into more people who were transplants than we did people who were native, and with some big schools in the area there were a lot of temporary residents as well. Add to that the number of tourists, and I was hard-pressed to hear anyone speaking with a “Southern twang” or anything close to it. The only stereotypical experience we had was at Schaffer’s BBQ, where some of the local’s accents were so thick I had a hard time understanding them, but they were kind as hell and made some damn fine BBQ.

I was worried, too, that for those of us who were spending a week there that we’d either be confined to Nashville Proper, or would run out of things to do. That was not the case, as I hope this post has confirmed. I will say that being whiskey fans, Other Chris and myself could have spent the rest of the month there and had things to do and places to go. There were many places downtown that we wanted to just go to and hang out at to listen to the music and absorb the vibes, but that was in constant conflict with the getting-to and getting-out; once we were ensconced at a location, everything was good and there were so many places to go down-town that assuming everything would be crowded was a mistake. The main strip was always jam packed, but there were plenty of places we passed even on the weekend where the music was good and the venue damn near empty. I do not have the data to explain why this was.

The About-Face

With expectations disproved, and despite my early-on panic attacks among the crowds, this was the first vacation I have taken that I was sad to end. I mean, the trip to Ireland was amazing and there was so much more to do there as well, but I think there’s a lot of factors involved in this one that made it different.

With Friends

This was the first distant vacation we had taken with friends. We have done a few regional get-aways but nothing where we all had to board a plane and rent a car. If you have a group of friends who get along and who will help plan the trip so everyone sees and does something that they want to do, then I highly recommend it. While it can add pressure trying to cover everyone’s bases, it also takes pressure off by putting a little bit of everything on everyone’s plate so the responsibility of “a good time” doesn’t become the responsibility of one or a few people.

With Age

Despite feeling like a complete senior citizen and making me hate that human beings actually age, it was an amazing feeling to be amidst that much energy. Part of me wanted to participate, sure, especially since I was never an overly social or outgoing person 30 years ago, but when I was able to step outside the ebb and flow it was great to just watch people doing their thing.

With Location

Coming from a lifelong North Easterner, Tennessee — at least the parts we saw — is a fantastic state. People were overwhelmingly nice and friendly, although we learned that “run left on red” is a thing that exists, and we learned it at the least opportune time imaginable, making driving in the state one of our least favorite activities. Environment-wise, it didn’t feel much different from New England, although there were less conifer trees as a rule, and we could not have asked for better weather, as unseasonal as it might have been. We never really felt out of place or even unsafe, although we always traveled in a group of at least four people and didn’t take alleyway shortcuts at night. I can say that having gone to Nashville, despite it’s crush of people and even it’s association with my least favorite genre of music, is one of my favorite travel experiences now.