Nashville (Tennessee)

After leaving Rocktown we had a long way ahead of us to get to the next bouldering location (Hueco Tanks). We could have driven there directly via Dallas, which would have been the shortest way, but also the most boring. Instead, we planned several stops and sights along the 1500 miles and shifted the route a bit further up north, so we could drive on the historic Route 66 for a while.
The first stop was Nashville. The music city. When we imagined that place back home, we thought of small music pubs with some live bluegrass, folk and country artists. We searched for concerts from Germany, but couldn't find much, so we figured, we would just go to some place and see if someone was playing there in the evening.
And then there is the real world...
We drove into Nashville and tried to find a parking lot. It was crowded like hell. All parking places were packed, people were walking across the streets, everywhere were bright neon signs and loud party music. We finally found a parking lot, realized that the fee was 45$ for 4 hours and continued our search. In the end we parked a little ways outside downtown for only 25$ for 6 hours...
Hungry as we were, we directly went looking for a diner and found a nice one downtown. We had coffee and an omelette and enjoyed the calmth of the place, which was a stark contrast to the world outside the diner.
Nevertheless, we strolled through the downtown area, went into some cowboy shoes and hats stores, saw funny people on the street and found out that there was in fact music everywhere. Just not like we imagined. There were showbands in every single bar, club and pub and they played music the whole day. There seems to be no difference between 11am and 9pm.
Most of the music we heard from the pubs was awful and there were drunk people everywhere, so we decided to leave without a concert. But I really wanted to go to the Johnny Cash Museum and it was worth it. The museum was very well designed and composed. It obviously contained much music, but they also displayed artwork and texts from JC and showed a 20-minute movie collage of movie appearances! JC really played a lot of roles in several movies, TV shows and he even had a cameo appearance in The Simpsons!
After the museum we happily left Nashville and continued our trip west until we reached a small campground half ways to Memphis.Read more