I warn you now, this is a long post!
Justin and I took one last trip in February, when I was 20 weeks, to Nashville, Tennessee. And we drove. We started our trip on Wednesday morning and stopped in Nacogdoches to visit Justin's Grandma, who was in the hospital, and ate lunch with his mom. We made it to Little Rock, AR that evening in time for dinner and stayed the night with Justin's Uncle Ron and Aunt Nevada. Also his cousin and her family came over to visit. Thursday morning we continued on to Nashville where we used Justin's Hilton points to stay at the Hilton downtown - and it was the perfect location. Our room was on the top floor and had a great view of the Country Music Hall of Fame. We were also right behind Music Row and a block from the Ryman theater. That Thursday afternoon we just walked around Music Row checking out the little shops and grabbed a bite to eat at a little hole in the wall place. On Friday, we started a little late but still managed to do a tour of the Ryman and the Country Music Hall of Fame. Thanks to the hotel concierge, we had some great coupons that saved us a lot of money on entrance fees.
The view from our room of the Country Music Hall of Fame. It is designed to look like a keyboard from the front and if you were directly above, it would look like a treble clef.
It was really nice.
That Friday night we went to the Grand Ole Opry and got to hear Jimmy Newman, Sunny Sweeney, Steve Wariner, Riders in the Sky, Connie Smith, Little Jimmy Dickens (who was hilarious, even at 90 years old!), Ray Pillow, Terri Clark, Vince Gill, John Conlee, Craig Morgan, and Jesse McReynolds and the Virginia Boys. It was a great show and again we had awesome aisle seats down in the "Gold Circle" thanks to our hotel concierge.
On Saturday we checked out the Parthenon and went out to the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's home.
I'm not sure why Justin was attempting to do the Egyptian (or is that the Running Man?) in front of a Greek replica inspired building, but it was cute and I took the picture nonetheless.
This does NOT look like the statue I saw in "Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief"!
Out at the Hermitage, where Andrew and Rachel Jackson are buried.
Their house was very pretty inside (no pictures of course). We toured the grounds via a carriage ride which was well worth it because it was actually pretty cool that day (in the 50's I think) and I was 20 weeks pregnant - that would have been a lot of walking and I was feeling lazy!
The rest of Saturday was spent visiting with some old family friends of Justin's, the Bingham's, who live in Nashville. Their son was part of a business expo that was going on in the convention center, again only a block from our hotel. We all went out to dinner afterwards at the Wild Horse Saloon. Mr. Bingham knew a guy that worked there so he got us seats right away at a bar which he opened up just for us. His friend also gave Justin and me several souvenir glasses for free!
The next day we checked out and headed to Memphis. The plan was to spend Sunday night in Memphis but when we started looking at where our hotel was (way outside of the downtown area), we decided to cancel our reservation and just drive all the way to Nacogdoches instead. We did stop in Memphis to eat lunch down on Beale Street and listened to a little bit of music. We plan to take another trip to Memphis in the future and actually spend some time there. But the break was a nice reprieve from the God-awful Tennessee highways. We ate at the Rum Boogie Cafe which was a favorite of my Dad's when we lived there.
We didn't make it in to Nacogdoches until about 10 that night. Justin's Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Daryl were there to let us in the house. It was a long drive that day (about 14 hours), but I'm glad we went ahead and did it. That gave us the luxury of being able to sleep in on Monday and only having about 2 1/2 hours left to drive back to Houston. We visited his Grandma in her assisted living place that morning and she was doing much better than when we saw her in the hospital. She still didn't talk much but she smiled a lot at Justin and made out a couple of words. This was also the last time we saw her alive because she passed away on March 17th. So we are even more grateful that we made it back to see her again that day. We finally made it back to Houston that afternoon, tired from being in the truck/driving, but glad we had the opportunity to check out Nashville and take our mini-vacation. It's certainly not the last time Tennessee will see us; we'll be back again someday!
