Nashville, TN (5/9-5/17)

A leisurely drive back down the mountain from Guntersville State Park and 2 hours later we hit Tennessee.  Seven Points Campground in Hermitage, TN is another Army Corp of Engineer park.  This park has only water and electric hook ups and no sewer hook up at our site.  There is a dump station at the entrance which we will have to use.  Could be interesting. 

We had 2 different sites booked for our 8 night stay as we added 3 nights a couple of weeks ago when we modified our route to include a Bourbon Trail stop.  This small campground is located on beautiful J. Percy Priest Lake.  It is about 25 minutes outside of downtown Nashville which is relatively close for such a lovely wooded setting.  Our first site was 42 which had a view of the lake, our second was site 4 which was a huge site near the entrance and bathhouse.  The camp hosts were super nice and checked in on everyone regularly.  

First site 42, view from our front windshield

Our first full day in Tennessee included a tour at Corsair Distillery.  It was recommended on one of the tourist maps.  We had a great tour with Carter and tasted a variety of their spirit offerings and he made a couple recommendations for food and music as he was a working musician in the area when not giving tours.  I have a sense that everyone in Nashville is either a musician, singer or songwriter, doing something else until they make it. 

We were also lucky enough to score tickets to the Tuesday night WSM Radio show hosted at the Grand Ole Opry.  The live performance broadcast over the radio has been going on since its founding in 1925, pretty incredible.  On this night, there were 8 performers.   While country music is not my first choice in genre, we got to see Keb Mo and the Old Crow Medicine show, which are two of my favorite blues and folk musicians respectively.  The theatre was still practicing social distancing and you could just feel the history and reverence of this place.  Great experience. 

Old Crow Medicine Show was awesome!

Socially distanced attendance.

Before we knew it, it was time to vacate our lakeview site and move to the interior site.  We packed everything up and headed to the dump station area.  It was a large crescent shaped paved area, but our 41ft RV does not bend like a truck pulling a trailer or 5th wheel.  Again, the camp hosts were very helpful to Mike and he negotiated the turn and took care of business.  Not all of it GLAMPING.

Mike backed in to site 4 with ease, but we soon realized that the site was extremely unlevel.  Being level is very important to effective deployment of the 4 slides of the RV.  Mike sized it up and determined we would have to drive up on blocks first, then deploy our leveling jacks.  This was a new experience as we had not had to do this anywhere before.  It was a bit nerve-wracking to get it right, but eventually we did and could settle in. 

Yikes, don't want to do this again.

Our tour guide at Corsair Distillery had recommended that on Wednesday we grab a burger at the Brown's Diner and then check out the "ladies night" music hosted by Vickie at Bobby's Idle Hour Tavern. Both are Nashville institutions.  Folklore has it that John Prine frequented Brown's and there were pics of him and the owner, along with many other Nashville stars and even Bill Gates.  This place was beyond vintage, and while Covid had left its mark on this place, we sat in the broken uneven bar stools and I had the feeling that John may have sat in my very seat and ordered a cheeseburger and fries like we did.  We didn't look too closely at the kitchen and the bar only served Pepsi products and Bud on draft, no liquor, but the cheeseburgers were super good and fries were fresh.  I was a little sad missing John Prine but enjoyed the walk down nostalgia lane. 

Yes, this sign says since 1927

Next we headed to Bobby's Idle Hour Tavern.  The small yellow building was about as long as our RV and a little wider.  It had a stage at the front which would hold 5 very talented lady musicians and singers throughout the night.  We were by far the oldest people in the place.  We grabbed a table up front and settled in for an unknown experience.  It was a tavern, not a gastropub, not a fern bar, not a lounge.  From the first lady vocalist invited on stage we were hooked.  There were 6 different singers doing a variety of country cover tunes.  The band was tremendous and added incredible harmonies to the lead singers.  It was an intimate, unique musical experience, we stayed to the very end. Carter gets a major thumbs up for both recommendations. 

We had crossed the Pearcy Priest dam on our way to the campground.  We found the visitor center one day and learned of a several mile greenway that you could bike or walk almost all the way to the Grand Ole Opry.  We packed a picnic lunch and trailered out bikes to the path after we played pickleball in the morning.  It was a spectacular ride.  My new e-bike performed very well and poor Mike was left to pedal his way up several long hills.  I kind of felt guilty zooming up the hills assisted by battery power, but I would not have been able to make the full trail ride without it anyway so I guess that is a plus. We stopped at a park on the route and had our lunch then headed back.  It was an awesome trail. 

River stop on our bike ride

View from our lunch spot.

We planned one night on Broadway, "the strip" in Nashville, Friday May 14th.  We did not realize that it was the first night that Nashville had lifted most of its occupancy and mask restrictions for bars and restaurants.  We started with a delicious BBQ dinner at Peg Leg Porker then headed downtown Nashville.  To say it was packed was an understatement.  It was practically like Mardi Gras.  Shoulder to shoulder everywhere inside and outside on the sidewalks. I had serious societal re-entry disorder that night.  We wore masks, practically the only ones, except waitstaff.  We found 2 venues with outdoor rooftop areas where we could breathe outside air.  

Good food, good story.

We had a couple drinks at each establishment, heard one good band.  It was a fun evening, but neither of us felt strongly that we would have to go back to that particular spot in Nashville.  It was worth witnessing the spectacle, much like Bourbon Street or Vegas maybe. 

Alley behind one of the bars on our walk back

We wound up our stay in the area with a sunny afternoon drive to Arrington Winery for some jazz on the lawn and a great hike in Long Hunter State park not too far from our campground.

 

On to Frankfort, Kentucky and the bourbon trail...