Nashville Country Music Hall of Fame

$50 Country Music Hall of Fame Gift Shop

Part 1 by Gabrielle

I bought this t-shirt because I liked the design on it and I wanted a shirt that said Nashville.

Part 2 by Danielle

Mum bought me a book that will make me famous! Well, it's a book that's supposed to help me get "My First Cut", which I just learned in music language means to get a song you wrote onto a CD. A real CD. So really, it's to help a normal person (like me) become famous, which is pretty much what I just said. Anyway, after I read a bit, I found out that most of the things it recommends for me to do I can't actually do, one of which is to move to either Nashville, Los Angeles or New York, which is pretty impossible for me. I think I'll keep it for when I'm older, and it isn't too much of an issue for me to move across the country. Maybe it will make me famous, someday. :D

Loveless in Tennessee

$25, Gifts from the Loveless Cafe, 30 min S of Nashville

Heading down the I40 towards our 2 pm horse riding appointment, I spied a sign for the Loveless Cafe.   On the vague recollection that Frommer's touted it as Southern Home Cooking and all day breakfast, not to mention the kids complaints of starvation, we took the 5 mile detour off the interstate.  Sure enough, we found a charming house converted into a cafe/restaurant, and a gift store converted from 1940s motel rooms.

Settling in for lunch, the kids were less than adventurous with their food choices, sticking to tried and true grilled cheese sandwiches.  (On an aside, I thus learned that Danielle now knows how to make her own grill cheese, having learned from the internet.)  Me, I went with the traditional Southern breakfast: 4 oz of thick country ham, red-eye gravy, eggs, and grits.  I keep forgetting that grits are not, in fact, a type of hash browns, but more akin to cream of wheat made with corn.  Aka runny polenta.  The girls wouldn't even taste a spoonful of it, but I find grits oddly comforting.  And oh - the secret recipe biscuits and homemade preserves were delish, and I don't even like jam!

Thusly impressed, I couldn't help but delay our departure further with a visit to the Loveless gift shop, exiting with strawberry preserves, hot sauce, and local honey with honeycomb.  The latter will be saved for an upcoming Ottawa Girls' wine & cheese night.

With the overly long lunch stop, and having removed ourselves from the interstate to continue instead along country roads, we were "only" 15 minutes late for our 2 pm riding time.  In typical southern style, the guide and other riders didn't seem to mind the delay :-)

A separate but related purchase...

$12.99 each for two bottles of Bogle Petite Sirah

A lovely, rich, and smooth California red, which has been enjoyed on several occasions at Canvas and other Ottawa restaurants.  Despite multiple attempts, I have learned that it is not sold by the bottle by the LCBO.  I inadvertently discovered it at the less than restaurant price in the Nashville Discount Liquor store.  'Twill also be saved for the Girls' Night.

Tally:

• $25 Loveless
• $26 Bogle
• $20 Ryman Recording
• $50 Country Music Hall of Fame mementos (to be written by Gaby & Danielle)
• $24 Nashville Nightlife
• $10 Tin Foil & Bubble Gum
• $10 McD Chick-fil-A

 = $165 spent, $235 to go...

Recording at the Ryman/Busking

I got $5.38. I only get to keep $4.00, though. I'll explain later...

The Ryman Auditorium. It's more than a room with a stage lined with wooden benches. It's a historic building, and so many people have played there, like... ME! I played there today! OK, I'm lying. Partially lying. We went to see it, and I played my guitar on the stage. Also, I recorded one of my songs in the recording studio! It was really cool, and it felt really professional. Now, I have a CD, with Stop You From Falling on it.
Also, today, I had my first experience busking! We went right outside an ice cream shop, and I played for an hour. I made $5.38! OK, I know it's not a lot, but it was a cloudy day, so there wasn't as many people as there could be. Gaby and Mum each got 15% of it, so I only got $4.00, in the end. It's still pretty good, for my first time. I'm so tired, now, after playing for an hour. I started running out of songs, but the good thing about busking is that I can play a song as much as I want. Tonight, we're going to the Rainforest Cafe. I haven't been there in so long!

Like the Market?

$24: 2 beer, banjo player, & one-way taxi home

The District in Nashville on a Saturday night in February is just like the Ottawa Market, except:

• there are more cowboy boots & hats;
• the weather is more like June;
• the neon lights look more like Las Vegas;
• you can smoke indoors;
• every second door leads to a live band; and
• every fourth doorway contains a busker.

One of whom I asked & learned that no busking license is required to play the street in Music City ("Hey, we're not New York" was part of his reply).  So Danielle will be setting up shop on a corner sometime this week :-).

So, other than the skanky college kids and the lecherous old men, Nashville is nothing like the Market.

$44 spent, $356 to go...

Tin Foil and Bubble Gum

By Danielle

It's amazing how interestingly inexpensive these are, and what you can do with them.

Mom found a list of things to do when you're bored in a long car ride on the Internet. Tin foil sculpting and bubble gum blowing contests were on the list. So, we stopped at a Walgreen's in Roanoke, Virginia, where our hotel for the night was, to buy them. We bought two kinds of tin foil (Heavy duty and light) and three kinds of bubble gum. We also found the most expensive thing in the drugstore: a curling iron, $39,99. In my opinion, not that expensive.

Anyway, we found a way to waste time and tin foil, which was pretty much the point of all this. Gaby made a troll head, the ones with their hair standing on end, and I made a pair of sunglasses, a swan, a dolphin and a guitar that looks like a piece of chicken. On second thought, it's a piece of chicken that looks like a guitar. All of our tin foil art is currently "decorating" the already very messy car. As for the bubble gum, we discovered the Bubble Yum was the best brand of the three, but we still think that Double Bubble is the best for blowing bubbles. We didn't really have a bubble-blowing contest, though.

On a completely unrelated subject, the theme song for the Nashville-Savannah road trip is officially "Forget You" by Cee Lo Green. We've heard it approximately 4 1/2 times already, half of them on a CD, the other half on the radio. I'm going to have it stuck in my head for the whole week, but I'm fine with that, it's a good song. I just hope the rest of them won't get annoyed next time we hear it.

More pictures are here.

Songs on the Road to Nashville

No thanks to Kevin, I needed a secondary theme to "songs that are dumbed down for radio play".  It's, duh, artists who've done songs about Nashville.

I debated, but in the end caved to the anticipated whims of my children and allowed tracks by Billie Ray Cyrus and his un-famous daughter at the end of CD #2.  :-P

Enjoy the Simplicity

Random stuff bought on the road, $400 US.  Memories that last a lifetime (yuck), priceless.

$10, Onandego NY, McDonalds' Southern chicken sandwich, Chipotle steak wrap & Mixed berry smoothie
On my last trip back from DC, Michael asked that I pick him up a couple of chicken sandwiches from the US.  He explained that Chick-fil-A (no, I am not making up the spelling, ewww) is a southern fast food chain.  Their chicken sandwiches are so popular that McD copied the recipe and sells their Southern Chicken Sandwich in the northern states.  It's nothing but chicken on a bun with a pickle.  Hence the "Simplicity".

Even funnier: the side of the box says "We Love You Just the Way You Are".  I wonder if Billy Joel gets any royalties.  Gotta love the US marketing machine.

I've been tasked by Michael to find the original sandwich, which I assume I'll run into it in Georgia.

By the way, I will be asking the kids to write some of these posts, so that I don't get too tired of my own virtual voice.

$10 down, $390 to go...