16 April ‘09
Thursday
9am and we were on “Tommy’s” Sightseeing Tour and heading downtown Nashville. We were but 2 on a bus of 22 which made for almost a full bus (2 short). It was comfortable but not like riding around in our own “bus”. This is a one man operation all the way, but he does it pretty well. Even while giving us some details about this or that, he was able to take phone calls from those that want to tour with him tomorrow or sometime in the near future. As I mentioned in yesterdays blog, Tommy is a charming guy, a non-stop talker, and quite a comedian, but we found out today that he is killing himself with heavy smoking, stress, and being overweight. Fortunately he didn’t smoke on the bus, but when we stopped…
Nashville is not only big in music, but one of the largest printing cities in the country, and is huge in higher education fields as well. Tommy didn’t give us the “Normal” tour that we’ve had through other tour companies, but much more personal. We spent at least 2 hours in Nashville touring the blocks on blocks of amazing architecture,
Thursday
9am and we were on “Tommy’s” Sightseeing Tour and heading downtown Nashville. We were but 2 on a bus of 22 which made for almost a full bus (2 short). It was comfortable but not like riding around in our own “bus”. This is a one man operation all the way, but he does it pretty well. Even while giving us some details about this or that, he was able to take phone calls from those that want to tour with him tomorrow or sometime in the near future. As I mentioned in yesterdays blog, Tommy is a charming guy, a non-stop talker, and quite a comedian, but we found out today that he is killing himself with heavy smoking, stress, and being overweight. Fortunately he didn’t smoke on the bus, but when we stopped…
Nashville is not only big in music, but one of the largest printing cities in the country, and is huge in higher education fields as well. Tommy didn’t give us the “Normal” tour that we’ve had through other tour companies, but much more personal. We spent at least 2 hours in Nashville touring the blocks on blocks of amazing architecture,
history, and entertainment establishments. One of our stops was at the “Train Station”. The train station was in need of a lot of work or they could take the easy way out and destroy it seeing as how they didn’t have a need for the station anymore. The passenger trains quit coming into Nashville quite a few years ago so taking the station down seemed to be the answer. Well a hotel chain took another look at this ole building and decided to take on a huge project and what a project they completed. Tommy wanted us to take a close-up look at this one, so he pulled up to the front door and told us to head inside.
These people did an amazing job of bring this incredible building up to the jewel it is today.
Following our time in town, Tommy took us out into the neighborhoods of the stars.
This wasn’t my thing, but we did see one home that I’m glad we saw. It sat on about 30 acres, had 3 guest homes, a small personal chapel, and the main house. All were painted white and had red roofs, and didn’t match the size of some of the others we saw, but it still belonged to Dolly Parton. Arriving back at the campground, Louise and I decided to head back to Nashville and get a closer look. The first stop was head on down to “Music Row”, order a couple of beers, and listen to the up-and-coming music stars of tomorrow. Seeing as how we drove into town we decided to just visit 3 establishments, have a total of a beer each, and yell “YeeHaa” a lot…we had a great time.
In between “establishments”, we walked some of the streets looking in to see what was going on, but at 4 in the afternoon, not much except back up on Broadway. We did stop by “ Fort Nashborough”. Fort Nashborough was established in 1779 just a few hundred yards further West on the banks of the Cumberland River.
The fort is much smaller today but it sure makes a statement sitting between the Cumberland River and all the towering skyscrapers of the city. Stop two was about 4 miles further out of the city at the park where they have constructed a full size copy of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.
For some reason this wasn’t part of Tommy’s tour and I’ll be darned if I can figure way not…it is very well done.
Unfortunately the original shows it’s age but is going through some major repair, while here in Nashville the Acropolis is just like new. They even have an amazing statue of Athena in the middle of the structure which in the original it was missing.
The one thing that was missing here in Nashville was the Acropolis sitting high on the hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea far below… Stop 3 was one that I wanted to make. We had passed by the State Capital building earlier with Tommy and I had noticed a location that I thought would make a good picture so back into town we went. The Capital Building does sit at the top of a hill and sprawling down below is a wonderful stretch of park land.
The green grass, the monuments of the Civil War, WWI, and WWII, a beautiful sounding Carillion and lots and lots of fountains completed the landscape.
Well with time getting moving on, and the sun dipping below the horizon, Louise had 2 more stops she wanted to make…Trader Joe’s and Costco.