From Athens to Barad-dûr

This past weekend, my husband and I headed out on a long weekend to Nashville. Are we country music fans? No, not particularly. But neither of us had been to Tennessee before, and we thought heading out on a Friday for an extended weekend would be a nice way to cross that state of our list.

We hadn't even left airport property when one of the trip's running gags began to take shape. The turn signal in our rental car (a Chevy Equinox) sounded exactly like the Monty Python bit of using coconuts to imitate a horse's gait. I thought it would never fail to make me smile... until a few hours into the trip, when I discovered (at a rather long traffic light) that it wasn't a horse with an even gait. Every few steps, it would rush for a split second and "clomp clomp" just a touch too early. Maddening. At least the car helpfully reminded you to check the backseat at the end of every drive. "Don't forget our babies" became a mantra of the trip.

Anyway... we started things off on-theme with a lunch at Edley's Bar-B-Que, before heading to a location that you might see as rather "off-theme." Do you know where the "Athens of the South" is? If you're like me, you might well have guessed... well, Athens, in Georgia. But no, Nashville seized that moniker at some point, apparently with its multiple universities and support for higher education reaching back to the 1800s. Near the end of that century, the city cemented their reputation by bringing Greece to Tennessee in the form of a full-size replica of the Parthenon.

I don't have the most impressive picture of Nashville's Parthenon, because on this occasion it was flanked with catering trucks, setting up a banquet space on the steps for a wedding reception being held there the next day. What that cost, I can't even imagine -- but at least it didn't stop us from going inside. Because, you see, the Parthenon is also a small museum, cyclically dedicated to the construction of the building itself and its centerpiece, a recreation of the giant statue of Athena that once stood in the original Parthenon. Built throughout the 1980s, then painted and gilded in gold in 2002 to represent what ancient Greek statues actually looked like in their time (not how we think of them today), this Athena and the explanation of how it was built is pretty much the only thing to see in the museum. But it was still an impressive, if quirky, novelty to start off the trip.

Speaking of gold, our next stop was to pick up the "gold pin" for the trip. If you've followed my trip blogs before, you may recall that we have in our house a large map of every craft brewery in the United States. We mark one with a silver pin if we taste one of their beers, and a gold pin if we go to the place in person. Whenever we visit a new state, we aim to pick up a gold pin -- a task somewhat harder these days, since the map dates to 2016 and many small breweries have closed. But New Heights Brewing Company in Nashville was still there, with a rather large and varied menu that made for a nice tasting flight.

From there, we headed to the downtown area, where we had a little over an hour before a riverboat dinner cruise we'd booked ahead of time. We used that time to first walk onto the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge. It crosses the Cumberland River, giving both lovely views of the downtown area and access to the stadium across the river where the Tennessee Titans play.

Then? Well, we had to see "Honky Tonk Highway," the stretch of downtown Broadway where bar after bar features live music until well after midnight every day of the week. Like New Orleans, where bars like this didn't necessary feature jazz, not every bar in Nashville was blasting country music. With enough time, we could have found any number of places that would have been fine to settle at for a bit. Still, it would have been a kind of sensory overload we weren't up for just then. (If ever?) And we did have somewhere to be.

River cruises have somehow become a bit of thing for us when traveling -- a nice way to see the sights without doing too much walking right on day one. This cruise was a bit different; besides being on a setting-appropriate paddleboat, it was a dinner cruise. The food was pretty good, though we'd practically finished the meal by the time the boat pulled away from the dock (a bit behind schedule). So we soon wandered up to the top deck, where we spent the rest of the cruise sightseeing and listening to the live musician work her way through a set of tourist-friendly country hits.

We realized that a daytime cruise probably would have been better; once the sun went down, there wasn't much to see but the glittery skyline of downtown. (I'm not the first to notice that its prominent AT&T building may have been inspiration for Peter Jackson in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Apparently, it's also known as the "Batman building.")

Still, it was a relaxing evening with a few really golden photo opportunities.

We had two full days in Tennessee ahead of us, and I think we made the most of it. You can be the judge as I share the memories in upcoming posts.