On the way to Nashville, I imposed on Ryan a Christmas song limit of one per day, because if I didn't he might have sang Christmas songs the whole way (Yes, he's a little obsessed with Christmas). And I sang him 90's Jams. So we were about even with annoying each other on the way up!
But anyway, we stopped in Nashville and saw something that we each wanted to see. We went to see my choice first, "The Hermitage", the home of former President Andrew Jackson. As a museum person, I was really interested to see what the interpretation of the Hermitage was going to be. It was interesting to see the angle that they would take in talking about Jackson. It turns out, however, that the tour was hardly at all about Jackson and more about the house itself, which I found to be good, because it kept the focus on the home.
Anyway, we had an enjoyable time. We started out at a visitor's center and then you take a self-guided walking tour of the grounds, leading up to a tour of the home given by guides in period costumes.
They gave out audio guides where you listened to different things along the tour. There was an adult audio narrated by a woman and a children's version narrated by a parrot. As could be predicted, I listened to the adult audio and Ryan chose to listen to the children's audio with the parrot. Ryan claims that the "parrot was much better" and enjoyed listening to it telling jokes.
Meanwhile, I thought the museum exhibit they had inside was very good and informative. I believe the Hermitage could train their guides a little better in how to capture a crowd's attention (most of them seemed either bored or confused on their information), but otherwise it was nice.
Here's Ryan standing in front of the rear of the home.
Then we drove over to downtown Nashville to visit the Belmont Mansion. The house was owned by Adelicia Aklen, a very wealthy cotton broker in the South. Taking over and inheriting the business from her first husband, Adelicia was very wealthy, powerful, and business savvy for someone who lived in the mid 19th century. It was fascinating to hear about her life and unlike the Hermitage, the tour guides at the mansion were very informative.
I think the coolest part of the mansion was that they did an incredible job restoring the home to its original character even though it had been greatly renovated when it was an all girl's school. I wish we could have taken pictures indoors, because the home was really quite lovely.
So anywho, we enjoyed our tour inside the mansion and it poured rain outside when we were done. We felt terrible for this couple who were about to get married in the home when we finished our tour, because the rain was sure to ruin their plans.
But then we left and I wanted to see the Parthenon building in Nashville because I heard that the city had built a replica model of the real Parthenon and I wanted to check it out. Turns out I entered the wrong address in the GPS and we couldn't find it at all in the pouring rain. I told Ryan to forget about it, but he was determined to help me find it, so we tried again and after driving around forever, we found it and I snapped a picture in the rain.
And that was Nashville. Nothing super exciting, but I'm really glad we got to see what we did, because we had a good time! Check out my next post about our adventure in St. Louis!
Nick
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