Nashville

We are back from a long weekend in Nashville which also included a side trip to Mammoth Cave. I was down for a live fantasy football draft.  The league has been going for over forty years - it used to be played by postcard and telephone - and they decided to have a live draft in Ohio for the 40th and rolled it back again this year.  I have been in for five years and am still the new guy. 

We renter a house in Leiper's Fork, a section of Franklin I had never heard of but is apparently quite the up-and-coming suburb.  People making money in entertainment buy big spreads for horses or cattle.  Justin Timberlake, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, Chris Stapleton and some others call it home now. Going back and forth into the city I learned a little of the geography. I like seeing what the countryside of a place looks like. This is more like Memphis than like Appalachia.

As we only had two days in Nashville we were limited in what we could see.  We went to the Parthenon, which also has an excellent exhibit of 19th C painting inside, and the Johnny Cash Museum, which is very well done. But one of the things I wanted to see was the downtown area with the noisy bars and the new phenomenon of bachelorette parties traveling far for a few nights of drinking and whooping. It seems odd to us from our generation, when bridesmaids might get together at a local restaurant beforehand. But not a whole long weekend hundreds of miles away.  It seems an extravagance and waste of resources.

Compared to traveling to Nashville for a fantasy football draft, that is.

We got to see one of the parties up close before we even got there. There was a group in Baltimore airport in matching black T-shirts that had something about whiskey on them, already a bit loud.  The eight of them ended up in the rows in front of us, and they brought out the little nip bottles they had smuggled on. The bride mentioned "getting their rally pants on" which sounded suggestive so I looked it up. I reported back to my sons that it seemed to refer to motorcycle or dirt bike racing pants, and the youngest corrected me that it meant throwing up so that you could keep drinking. Yes, that makes more sense in context. Chelsea and Erica discussed how the one-hour time change affected arrival time for about twenty minutes, and then again later after the flight was delayed they discussed it again. Lindsay and Caitlin reminded the group that they can't be thrown out of the plane. 

We saw similar groups on trolleys on Broadway, having a fine time.  There is also a type of trolley that is pedaled while the women sit across from each other and someone steers and serves drinks. Less whooping out of those girls, I think. Broadway is quite loud, as expected, as everyone has their doors and windows open and has live music. 

I think that is Anita Carter singing lead, but correct me if it is June. 

I have run this next video before, but it is featured strongly at the end of the museum display and is quite powerful in that context, perhaps especially when you are hearing it back-to-back a few times. It has been named top five and even best-ever by several raters, so I guess my instincts were right a few years ago.