Our Travels: Nashville

This week we went to Nashville to play because Matt had to go to a conference. I've never been to Nashville, and always thought it would be a great place to go. I have to say that I really enjoyed the trip, but without being knowledgeable of the area and things to do, it was difficult to find things to do and places to go that fit all of our likes especially in such a short time. We were there for about two days.



Our first stop was at the Parthenon and Centennial Park. It had a few interesting art exhibits of oil paintings and photography, and I found the history of the building and restoration of the Parthenon to be fascinating. I've know it was there for many years, but I had no idea that it had so much history behind it. We toured the building and walked around the grounds for a while watched the fish and turtles and birds in the landscape and found a historic train engine and plane.

We headed out to find something for lunch and ended up at a great place called The Pharmacy(odd name, but the food was excellent). Although we didn't order any there was also an impressive list of Bier(beer) and there was also an old-school soda fountain. The food was great and, the service was too even though it was extremely busy. The kids had burgers and fries, and Matt and I split a Biergarten Platter; it was a sampling of Wurstchen. We had Jaugerwurst, Currywurst, and Kielbasa. It was served on a bed of sauerkraut, with a couple of mustards and we chose German Potato salad to go with it.

At this point we had to bring Matt to his first meeting and try to find something to do. We tried to find something and decided that driving aimlessly in that town was a little stressful. I did stop a couple of times to take a picture here and there, but we decided to check into the hotel and figure out what options there were.

We ended up waiting for Matt to get back from his tour/meeting and went out to the Chinese Lantern Festival that just happened to be there. I was really excited to see this. It was a really beautiful display of delicate frame structures covered in silk and lit from the inside making an amazing collection of lantern figures.

The next day, we started out and went to McKay's Book Store. This place was huge...we could have probably spent the rest of our time there and still not seen everything. But we had to get Matt to his next place and figure out our day. So we left with our stash of books and dropped Matt off at his trade show.

Then we went to Fort Negley and walked the grounds and got a nice view of the Nashville Skyline from the top of the fort. We learned a little about the Civil War and the fortification of Nashville when it was taken over by the Union soldiers.

The kids got tired and hungry and we left to go on our next place but we couldn't decide where so I picked the Opry Land Hotel. It was huge and unbelievably amazing. It ended up taking up a lot of our day. It has some of the most beautiful indoor gardens that I have ever seen.

There were 4 huge gardens with trails, canals, waterfalls, fountains, beautiful tropical plants, trees, and palms. It was a beautiful walk, and we only saw part of it we didn't make it through all of the gardens.

Overall, it was a fun little stay, I just wish we were better prepared with a plan and an idea of how to navigate the town...maybe on a return trip. It was only a 4 hour drive.