Music City Here We Come!
Given the incredible start to our southern journey, it’s hard to imagine that we could have any aspirations of surpassing our day one adventures. However, Marisa and I were up to the challenge.
After about 6 cups of coffee and a couple hours of conversation with cousin Pete and his lovely wife, Marisa and I headed out. We made a quick pit stop at Teresa’s favorite Lexington breakfast joint, The Coffee Pub, for some chicken tamales, which they were out of, and then we headed even further south to Nashville, TN!
We decided to save a few bucks on lodging in Nashville and got ourselves a primitive campsite at Jellystone Park - complete with showers, free wi-fi, mini-golf, and a pool. More on the pool later.
For now, a slight digression: I’m writing this while driving from Memphis to New Orleans and the radio, called “The Pig,” is blasting: “She’s not my mama, she’s my monster-in-law.” Gotta love country music in the south!
Now back to your regularly scheduled blog post…
After setting up our tent we realized we needed some provisions. Being in Tennessee, the natural stop for any shopping trip is your local neighborhood Walmart. For those that don’t know, I love Walmart and despite her protests, so does Marisa. After about an hour of shopping for groceries and a cooler, Marisa pleaded for a few more minutes to check out the sexy fashions on the discount clothes rack. I conceded. Then, after we checked out and were just about back to the car, Marisa pointed out that we had forgotten grilling supplies for supper. So we had to go back in for round two. What a great time!
After visiting the shopping Mecca, we headed back to the campground where it was about 147 degrees in the shade. This prompted a trip to the pool where we did underwater races, one-armed swimming races, breath holding contests, and Marisa kept doing hand stands in the pool. In short, we had a blast acting like we were 7 years old again. Well, I was acting like a 7 year old and Marisa more like a 5 year old, and it was still a blast.
Then it was time to find some BBQ and listen to some music. The first was accomplished at Jack’s BBQ (which was tasty) and the second was begun at The Stage next door. The Stage was a “traditional” honky tonk (aka: well decorated tourist trap) that had a fantastic country cover band playing. We drank a couple of Miller Lites and then headed to a much more local establishment called the Station Inn.
The Station Inn was a small, dingy building that was absolutely packed with people there to see a 12 piece band called Time Jumpers. Now I’m occasionally prone to exaggeration, but in this case, it’s true, there really were 12 people on stage and they covered the full spectrum of music known to man from bluegrass to country to western. This was a truly fun experience.
And that was the end to day two. I’m really not sure how day 3 stands any hope of surpassing that but I have no doubts that Marisa and I will give it the old UW-Madison college try!