For our kiddo's 18th(!!!) birthday this past weekend, we headed to Nashville to celebrate.
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When you see a T-Rex heading to baggage
claim, you know the trip is starting out well. |
As we did the countdown to her birthday, we were sure to keep her posted about how many hours she had left to commit a felony before she'd be charged as an adult. (Spoiler alert: She
totally squandered this opportunity.)
Our last family visit to this city was in May 2015, at which point it was just beginning to become the all-hours/every day drinkathon it seems to have become. (Seriously. Party buses and drinking start around 9:30am and every single bachelorette party takes place here. On the upside, there is great live music in all of the dozens of honky-tonks on Broadway at any time of day or night, which is pretty amazing.) We returned to The Second Fiddle to recreate a photo we had taken during the first trip:
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| October 2023 |
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| May 2015 |
Our hotel was about eight blocks to downtown - a nice walk that took us past the Country Music Hall of Fame, National Museum of African American Music, Bridgestone Arena (where Phish was playing for three nights while we were in town), and the historic Ryman Auditorium. In keeping with the theme of all music/all the time, our hotel made available record players and albums to check our during our stay - which of course, we did:
The first night we were in town, we met up with friends who live about an hour outside of Nashville: grandparents and their grandkids we met on a trip to Peru in 2021. They are a cool bunch and we had a blast catching up with them. (The grandparents are close to 80 years old and heading to Bonaire in a couple of weeks for a dive trip, if that gives you any indication...)
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| October 2023 |
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| December 2021 |
During the weekend, we shopped at several vintage shops, including one that had a lot of rock 'n roll paraphernalia. I had just about convinced my daughter she needed a super cool Sid Vicious t-shirt when she looked at and saw the $200 price tag.
Nashville has also become a lot more fancy.
As we made our way back to our hotel, we stopped to try hot chicken, going with "medium" over "hot" in a last-minute decision. That did not make it in any way palatable. No fans of hot chicken, we.
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| What evil tastes like. |
One evening, we walked past a karaoke bar and decided to go in. Almost to a person, the people singing karaoke could sign a contract to become recording artists. Our daughter, who is not known to be a singer, really wanted to go on stage, but was understandably apprehensive about getting up there alone. Not to be dissuaded, she found a group of four women singing together and approached them as they came offstage to see if they'd be interested in singing with her and THEY WERE.
They sang Sk8er Boi by Avril Lavigne and KILLED IT!
Also at the karaoke bar, we saw an assistant coach from our daughter's high school football team. At her request, he took a photo with her then made a quick exit, probably wisely surmising that photographic evidence of him with a drink in hand at a bar with a student may not be that well-received.
We headed back to Broadway at midnight, so Ave could be among the party people when she officially reached adulthood:
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| Some Phish-goers. |
Our last day in Nashville, we made good on a promise for my daughter to get her inner ear pierced. She claimed it was painless, but the thought of it was unsettling enough for her to pass out cold in the lobby of the piercing studio, which is apparently not great for business as they immediately shuffled her off to a back room where she could lie down.
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After regaining consciousness,
Ave asked hopefully if I had taken a picture of her in
the passed-out heap. I informed her I did not, as
I was busy pretending to be a concerned parent.
The above is a re-creation of what she looked like. |
Once Ave felt stable again, we wandered over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which was very interesting, had lunch at
Pinewood Social, and headed to the airport. When we landed at IAD, she was reminded that due to the time difference, she had one more hour to celebrate her birthday in Virginia.
