Nashville

The home of country music, the ‘buckle’ of the Bible belt and also, and probably surprisingly, the 3^rd largest city geographically wise in the US. Even more surprising since neither of us were aware and it got hardly any news coverage, the victim of severe flash floods earlier this year in May. This unfortunately means that a number of tourist attractions are currently closed for extensive refurbishment, with rumours that the Opryland Mills Mall near our hotel may even need to be torn down and rebuilt it was so badly damaged. It is actually incredible how badly the city was flooded, they had over 6ft of water in places and we had absolutely no idea! It seems even the US media didn’t give it much coverage. It’s really worth checking out the video below to get an idea of how bad the floods were and you can compare some of the scenes to the pictures we have taken over the last few days. Also keep an eye out for the AT&T building which the locals call the Batman building, since it looks like his mask, and the R2D2 look-a-like skyscraper next door.

They’ve done an amazing job clearing up so far and apart from the closed areas you wouldn’t know anything had happened! Nashville is very similar to Memphis in terms of its influence on music and many Country and Western stars live and perform regularly in the city. Today we took a guided tour to discover some of the places that make Nashville famous. Our first stop was the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, a three floor building dedicated to Country music’s history and performers, from Hank Williams to Taylor Swift, they all started in Nashville. They also all played at the Grand Ole Opry, the world’s longest running live radio programme featuring Country music. They run weekly shows out of Nashville, usually from the Grand Ole Opry House. Unfortunately that is still closed for refurbishment from the flood damage (see video for photos). However our tour did take us to the Ryman Auditorium, a 2,362 seat venue that was the historic home for the Grand Ole Opry and the current temporary home. The theatre claims that the auditorium has the 2nd best acoustics in the world and it’s stage has been graced by countless artists from; Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan to in more recent years; Oasis, Smashing Pumpkins, Sigur Rós, Bryan Adams, Kings of Leon, Arcade Fire and Coldplay and now Jenny and I after grabbing two guitars and jumping up on stage to pose for photos.

Our tour continued by taking us around Nashville to see the various other points of interest including a full scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens which is in fact their sister city. We also popped into a few of the bars downtown, including world famous Tootsies, to catch some live music and have a drink. This evening we nipped to the movies to see Expendables, which somewhere along the line forgot it was supposed to be fun rather than make botched sentiments about mans lack of compassion, before heading back downtown to Wildhorse Saloon for more live music and award winning BBQ...it’s a hard life!