Music City USA

Hello from my front porch, the sun has finally arrived in Cleveland so I get to sit outside to type my blog!

Our trip down to Nashville, Tennessee started brilliantly! A couple of days before we left I proudly announced to Amanda that after a long spell out due to injury I was going to play football again! I was so excited and so was a little taken aback by Amanda's reaction "Are you sure you should, you better not hurt your knee again and end up limping so badly that we can't do anything in Nashville,  like when you played football before our trip to Pittsburgh". My Mum displayed a similar sentiment "you stupid child, you know it makes your knee swell up". Of course I played football anyway and was mortified the next morning when I noticed my knee had swollen up to the size of a beach ball and I could hardly walk. Amanda was not best pleased, thank goodness it healed quickly.

A Horrible storm we drove through outside Nashville.

Bright and early and knee permitting on Friday morning we left for Nashville and almost immediately hit bumper to bumper traffic in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnatti and Louisville before a thunderstorm of epic proportions just outside Nashville nearly washed us away for good. This all contrived to turn a nice 8 hour road trip into a 12 hour marathon. I guess it could have been worse, At least I didnt have a boil on my bum! Road trips are romanticized in so many books and movies they really do seem exciting - Setting out onto the open road with all the world as your oyster, at least that is till you actually set off on one and realise the reality of it is you're going to be sitting in endless traffic jams on endless, monotonous highways harrassed by truck drivers and driven loopy by the speed limits....  If only I could have a dime for every Macdonalds we drove by. Or even every Trump and NRA bumper sticker for that matter :) 

Our cute little Air BnB!

Well we didn't give in and eventually arrived. We met up with Sheila and Ken (Amandas Mother and Step Father) who had found a great little house for us all on airbnb - It was in a place called Murfreesboro, a 'suburb' of Nashville that was actually a good hours drive from the city. Due to the huge, sprawling cities and massive amounts of space it is not unusual for somewhere an hour away from the city center to still be considered a part of it. Murfreesboro was lovely, with a quaint old fashioned high street and lots of little shops to get breakfast, coffee and ice cream, the latter being a neccessity with the mercury almost hitting 100 degrees and enough humidity in the air to drown a dolphin. We plumped for the city Cafe for our breakfast, a delightful little spot with Southern accents filling the air and some things on the menu I had never seen before including Grits, biscuits and gravy and Fried Bologna. The biscuits and gravy were the best of the bunch, it is nothing like an English biscuit, basically it is a scone with some gravy poured on top, Yum! The fried Bologna was interesting, it is not pronounced like the Italian city but as Bal-Oh-Knee and turned out to basically be a piece of fried spam which was nice when compared to the grit - best described as pieces of dirt picked up from the side of the road, mixed with some goo and thrown in a bowl, I have heard that it tastes nice with sugar but I am not so sure about that.

Grits on the left, Gravy at the top, Bologna on the right and the buscuits at the bottom!

 After a good breakfast you have to head into Nashville, the home of country music! There wasn't a lot of love for Nashville among our Cleveland contingent from the wedding, it was too hot, noisy, busy, and tacky. It may have had an element of all of these things but I personally loved it! They have a street nestled right in the center among the skyscrapers called the Honky Tonk, full of packed bars and restaurants with each one boasting a live band and as much country music as your ears can lap up. We visited on a saturday and combined with the 90 degree heat and all the people it was certainly an assault on the senses! The appeal to the Honky Tonk lies in it's history, For a while Nashville boasted one of the largest radio towers in the nation and the biggest by far in the South thus attracting Country Stars and wannabees to Nashville to enable them to reach the biggest audience possible on this new fangled thing - Radio! The radio may have been overtaken by more modern technologies such as Youtube and the like but Nashville has maintained it's place as the capital of Country Music.

Looking up the Honky Tonk. 

A kiss by the Cumberland River.

The Honky Tonk with all the Skyscrapers in the background.

In keeping with the Country spirit we visited the hatch show print company, A Nashville institution that has produced posters for almost all the country stars over the years. The shop has been going since 1879 and it was fun to hear some of the stories related to their posters. One that made me chuckle was a poster they made for Elvis which travelled around the world thanks to a photographer for life magazine and a conservative preacher. The pastor was holding up the poster while preaching about the evils of 'pop music' with the Elvis Poster in his hand, got snapped in the act by the photographer and made the front page of Life, reaching a global audience as a result. I wanted to include a picture of the Elvis poster here but sadly I neglected to take one!

A printing press at Hatch Show Print, the shelves in the background contain all the old carved letters they use to make the posters, some of them date back to 1879!

This is me making my own poster!

While in Nashville it is also very important that you visit the GooGoo chocolate shop, the original chocolate goo goo is the best, but if you are going to buy some to take home can I also suggest not leaving them in the car on a 100 degree day or you may return to a very sticky mess!

You must go to Goo Goos but do not leave the chocolate in the car!

In the evening we took a trip to see another Nashville institution - The Grand Ole Opry - This is the worlds longest running live radio show and showcases Country Music every Saturday night. I really enjoyed it and I think it is a must see for anyone, regardless of your opinion of country music. It is wonderful that all of the current stars of Country seem to respect and relish playing at the Opry, there seems to sense of prestige about playing on the same stage as the old greats such as Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline. Even Bob Dylan has performed on the famous stage! Something that is neat is that when the Opry moved into it's purpose built stage in the 70s they cut a circle out from the middle of the old stage and carried it to the new venue so the performers today get to stand on the same stage as the legends from the past. A highlight of the show for Amanda and I was Charlie Nagatomo, A Japanese country singer famous for bringing country music to Japan and even opening up a nightclub over there that plays nothing but Country Music, he had a Southern accent as well, it made me chuckle!

The stage at the Grand Ole Opry! Can you spot the circle?

The wedding was wonderful, it was a real Southern affair with Waffles and Chicken served for dinner, absolutely delicious! The temperature was 100 degrees and it was a outside ceremony so it was lucky we arrived fashionably 'almost' late so we didn't have to wait outside for long before the ceremony started, I got extremely sweaty in my suit! The reason we were 'almost' late was thanks to the horrendous Sunday traffic in Nashville, apparently the locals call it 'church traffic' as it is in the bible belt after all! I must wish Reid and Rachel all the best for your lives together, and enjoy your honeymoon in St Lucia! Maybe you'll get to cool off a bit there! Lucky Devils!

Congratulations Rachel and Reid!

Our journey home was much better than our journey there, we hit no traffic at all and even better we stopped off at the Jim Beam bourbon distillery for a tour! Neither Amanda or myself really drink spirits but it was really nice getting to know about bourbon and of course getting to try some nice bourbon at the end! Our distillery tour guide was really good and informative, He told us that the longest a barrel of bourbon can be stored for is 15 years because if you leave it any longer than that so much of the whiskey would have evaporated it wouldn't really be worth opening the barrel, they call the missing bourbon the 'Angels Share'! Something else which is quite interesting is that a lot of the buildings at the distillery are a black colour, this is because when the whiskey is being stored and the angels are taking their share a black fungus is created by the evaporation, covering the warehouses and even the tree bark with what looks like a think black paint!

The Jim Beam Distillery in Clermont, Kentucky.

It takes 14 Square feet of corn to make one bourbon bottle.

This picture epitomises the South,The Baptist Church surrounded by the Distillery warehouses! Note the black colour of the buildings and the tree bark.

A great breakfast on our last morning, you can't go wrong with pancakes!

Getting Chased by a storm on our way home, look at the contrast of the sky behind us and the sky ahead of us!

I must also put a shout out to our next door neighbour Mark who very kindly looked after Luna the Cat while we were gone! Thank You :)