Nashville and Danny Boy

Road Trip: Day Ten. Miles travelled: 3480.
States visited: 12. Time zones covered: 4

We arrived in Nashville at 7pm last night, considerably later than expected, after getting caught up in the mother of all tailbacks whilst fleeing Carbondale. I don't know where this particular world and his wife had gone to view the eclipse. It certainly wasn't where we were!

The biggest issue I have with Nashville is that I can never remember it's name! I keep calling it Memphis, and more recently Knutsford, which is plainly just disrespectful!

Our old, dear friend, Dan Carter lives here and came to the hotel to meet us. And what a ray of blissful sunshine that precious lad is! It was utterly delightful to see him. We handed him the reins, said "show us Nashville", bundled into his car, and ended up at Wild Cow, a vegetarian restaurant which, for the first time since we left San Fran, actually smelt of healthy food rather than cooking fat, grilled cheese and meat! The restaurant is in a hipster area of the city, which is apparently on the up and up ever since a twister pretty much destroyed it, thereby allowing town planners to start again.

Vegetarians panic in vegetarian restaurants. Choice is not something we're used to. We spend our time looking for the v on the menu, checking it's not got coriander in it, and ordering that. Thy had a full eclipse in Nashville as well, so the place was full of excited hippies. One came up to me to admire the rhyolite bracelet I'd bought for six dollars in a ghost town somewhere back in Nevada. Apparently rhyolite is a very powerful stone. I was half expecting her to do some reiki or aura-cleansing on me, and I'm sure she would have done had I not needed to go.

From the vegetarian restaurant, we drove to the downtown district.

I really like Nashville. It's a genuinely interesting place which feels very comfortable with itself. Kids are out on the streets late at night, which is a sure indication that the place is safe. It's a fabulous blend of old and new. We entered the area via the Shelby Street Bridge (built in 1909), which was a road bridge until it started to fall down. Instead of allowing it to crumble, which is almost certainly what would have happened in a place like St Louis, they renovated it and turned it into a pedestrian bridge. It's lit up beautifully at night, and the air above it is thick with night hawks. At first we thought they were large bats. I'm not used to seeing flocks of birds so active after dark. One assumes the birds are drawn to the insects which have been drawn to the flood lighting.

A tiny snake slithered about in the lift which took us to the top of the bridge. We thought it was sweet, but could hear the people who got in the lift as we got out screaming all the way down! When we returned at the end of the evening, the lift had been closed! Maybe a giant mummy snake appeared to work out what the yelling was all about!

We walked down Broadway, which is the street where all the live music bars are situated. Most of the buildings in this part of town are from the turn of the twentieth century. Some look how imagine the French Quarter in New Orleans to look with ornate balconies. All of the bars have old-school neon signs outside, many of which are from the 50s and 60s. There are so many of them, all at different heights and different sizes, that the place seems to shimmer. It's really rather magical.

Buskers play music on the streets, the sounds of live bands reverberate from the clubs. The street is a riot of light and noise. The people there seemed rather un-American, somehow, with few of the grotesque fatties who were so prevalent in the Midwest states, or any of those plastic, over-tanned, over-skinny freaks you get on the Pacific coast. Everyone seemed very real. I might have been in Manchester!

Dan took us to Robert's, which was described by the lead singer of the live band playing there as a "honky tonk." I've never heard the word used in the context of anything other than pianos, but he seemed authentic enough, so I bow down to his greater knowledge! Dan tells me that honky tonk can also be used as a verb. You can go honky-tonking - meaning to go from one honky tonk joint to the next. Whatever the case, Roberts is a charming bar with a charming vibe. The walls are lined with cowboy boots and dusty pictures of the great and the good of country music going back decades. We were treated to a six piece country band, including a steel guitar and a highly talented violinist. The players were all in their fifties and sixties and had that old-school effortless pro vibe about them. They barely broke a sweat as they played the most complicated licks and improvisations. The whole point of county, or so it seems, is to appear as laid back as possible. What I particularly loved was watching people in the crowd dancing. Proper pairs dancing, having a wonderful time without feeling the need to take the mick or appear really cool.

The band's front man described the band as "proper old country boys, playing real traditional classic country, like Nashville was built on." You can't say fairer than that! The singer was also able to do multi-phonic steam train whistles with his mouth, which made me very happy. The bar smelt of beef being barbecued.

Much as I was enjoying the vibe, there comes a time with me and all bars where I have to leave. I get very claustrophobic in and I'm one of those people who always ends up standing in the place that everyone wants to use as corridor. I get buffeted about. Then I worry about my ears and the loud music. Then I worry I'll damage my voice again by shouting. At that point, I know I just need to exit at speed!


On our way home, just as we got back onto the pedestrian bridge, we saw a less pleasant side of the city in the shape of a woman, plainly high on crack or alcohol, in a terrible state, emptying dustbins, screaming, ranting and wailing. She then started throwing bricks at the windows of a nearby building. Glass was shattering all over the place, so Dan was forced to call the police. We stood on the bridge and watched as a copper nonchalantly arrived. As he walked towards her, he put on a pair of black latex gloves before casually cuffing her and leading her away. It was all rather sad. She went passively. I guess she wanted to get arrested. It probably meant a decent meal, a good bed and a chance to sober up, or perhaps she just wanted something tangible to match the pain she was feeling.




We woke up early and met Dan at the hugely noble house he's lodging in, which, built in 1800, is considered to be the oldest home in Nashville. It was part of a cotton plantation which has subsequently been swallowed up by the city. We went in to meet the charmingly eccentric owner of the house, Amy. She has the most extraordinary art work across her walls and lives in a world of bohemian clutter which reminded us all of Anna Madrigal in Tales of the City. It was fairly astonishing to be in an American house which felt like it had pretty much witnessed the birth of its country - certainly its infancy. Tennessee itself, I believe, only became a state in 1797.




Speaking of the inauguration of the state, Dan took us for a little jaunt in Centennial Park, which was created to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Tennessee (whose capital, incidentally, is Nashville.) The park's crowning glory is a full scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens, and it's a great deal more impressive than the replica of Stone Henge we saw two day's ago! It was built in 1897, so it's got some age, and it feels like it was built to last, despite, somewhat bizarrely, being covered in a form of pebble dash. They sometimes refer to Nashville as the Athens of the South because of all the seats of learning there. (Dan tells us it's a now centre of excellence in the field of medical research.) So giving the city its own Parthenon felt appropriate.




The park is full of little freestanding wooden hammocks, which take the place of benches. You can propel yourself backwards and forwards on them by pushing down on a platform with your feet. It's all very quaint, as they say here. The park also has a F-86L jet plane suspended on a stalk and the engine of train from the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis railway. I wondered if that made it the Chattanooga Choo Choo? We sang the song, obviously, and it's been caught in a desperately irritating loop in my brain ever since!




Humidity in Nashville is quite intense at this time of year. They say it's only bad like this for a few weeks, but it was certainly making us all sweat profusely. One of the things Dan likes most about the town, however, is the climate. He says they get four proper seasons there. Autumn is apparently the best time to be there. The trees all turn shades of copper and red, and the breeze is fresh.




We went to a cafe where everyone was looking at pictures of the eclipse. It's certainly captured everyone's imagination down here. Dan tells me a cloud passed over as totality struck, and I suddenly realised quite how lucky we'd been - particularly when you consider what the forecast had been for Carbondale.




Service in the cafe was slow like you wouldn't believe. At one point the woman behind the counter stopped what she was doing, emptied out her tips jar, slowly counted all the coins inside and exchanged them for notes from the till. Surely, I thought, this was something which could be reserved for the end of a day when there's not a massive queue. It was twenty minutes before we got served and then another lifetime before the drinks arrived! There's a very different pace to life down there. Probably due to the heat.




Our time in the city ended in Elliston Place Soda Shop, where we ate a hugely sickly chocolate cake covered in a big dollop of meringue (inedible after one mouthful) and an Orange Frosty, which had a curiously high dairy content (also inedible after one mouthful!!) I find food with a high cream content - particularly when it's synthetic cream - utterly foul. I think the others enjoyed their food.




We were on the road by 1pm for a six hour drive to Roanoke in Virginia which became a nine hour marathon during which we all went mad in our little tin box in a series of traffic jams. We saw on the telly in the diner that a heavy storm was predicted and were pelted by frighteningly huge quantities of rain within thirty minutes of leaving the city.




At 3.18pm, midway across Tennessee, we entered Eastern Standard time, and suddenly it was 4.18 and we'd entered the time zone that would accompany us all the way to New York. We're now only five hours behind the UK.




We got stuck in heavy traffic in Northern Tennessee, which gave us an opportunity to look at more road side advertising hoardings. Our favourite (in a disturbing way) was "Machine gun rentals. Stop. Shop. Shoot." Another said, "Jesus is Lord. We buy guns. Trump." The poster might as well have said, "we are mad. We are mad. Mad."






We passed into Virginia, our twelfth state, at 7.20pm. And almost as soon as we did, we were greeted by a whole hillside covered in Virginia creepers! It really is a thing here! It glues itself to quite a lot of trees and creates the most astounding shapes. Human forms. Dark green mythical animals. Mystical buildings. I'm sure it looks wonderful in the autumn. But equally sure it's not that good for the trees!