A Grand Tour of Nashville!

Today was a good day in Nashville Tennessee. It was probably the most I've ever done in a single day, at least in a long time. It was exciting though, and me and the Hill fam had a great time doing it. Let me tell you what we did...

B: If you look on the map above, we drove from A, where the Hills live to B, Loveless Cafe. The Loveless Cafe is an old southern style resturant and hotel where you can get some good country cookin. We forgot to take a picture of what we got, but you can pretty much guess what we had. Fried chicken and bisuits. Mama Hill and I had eggs and French toast actually, because you can get both all day, I think. Loveless is sort of a local tradition.

C: What else is there to do after breakfast but geocache? I don't know... maybe take a nap? We certainly felt like taking a nap, but the weather was so warm and beautiful it would have been a waste. So we set out to the Natchez Trace Parkway Bridge to find our first cache of the day. This bridge is remarkable and gorgeous. You rarely get to see architecture that complements the environment around it, so it was neat.

When we can't find a geocache, we call it a "Geo-crap" because its really annoying. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the Natchez Trace Parkway Bridge cache, either because of our ineptitude or because it simply wasn't there. Hopefully the latter. Here is a shot of me not finding a geocache (rare, but these things do happen)

D: We decided to keep on heading down the road to Leiper's Fork, a small town where apparently a lot of stars live. And by stars, I mean people that are famous, not celestial bodies. This cache was a bit tricky, as it had us tracking up a hill and into thick brush. You can see below we had to park the car and walk the rest of the way to get there.

Once we got to the top of the hill, my GPS was pointing straight into thick rocky brush. Mr. Hill walked in a few feet and lifted up a rock and pretended to find it, but what he actually found was a huge brown snake. After standing there for a few minutes, I decided to go in and follow my GPS where ever it told me to go, even if it seemed there was no way in . After about 15 feet of going through bushes and sticks a trail opened up before me and took me right to the cache! [insert spiritual lesson here]

That is my side-kick who followed me fearlessly into the snake infested brush. In the cache was a cool bear pin that Jessica can add to her large pin collection. She put a pin in the cache she got at Mountain Top.

Mom and Dad Hill went in with us too! Here is a shot of Mom Hill trying to get out of all the thorns.

After the cache we decided to visit the small town and stop by one of the shops. We almost made a citizens arrest when we saw this familiar police car sitting out in front of the store! (For those of you who don't know that is the police car from the Andy Griffith Show made in the... well a long time ago before color was invented.)

E: We thought we'd go back into Franklin to find another geocache and stroll around the town for a while, sans the chaotic "Dicken's of a Christmas" we ran into the other day. The cache we found was actually across the street from the Episcopal church we took our picture in front of in the last post from Franklin.

The last people to find this cache couldn't find it and deemed it missing, but we found it! Here is a shot of me putting it back in its hiding place at the base of a flag pole at a military memorial in downtown Franklin.

We decided to take a bit of a Siesta and get some ice cream and root beer floats from Ben & Jerry's, albeit Kilwin's arch nemesis.

We took naps, relaxed, and chatted for a little while before our next adventure for the evening. Mom Hill and Aunt Nancy wanted to go to the Opryland Hotel (don't let the word hotel fool you, its like 5 times the size of my university) to show me what a Nashville Christmas is like. Well let me tell you, it is quite remarkable.

Outside they had trees that had nearly every branch lit. It really is an art, what these places do. They also had this nativity outside of it, which Jess really enjoyed. I sort of felt like they needed to paint the white statues because they reminded me of those white statues you get at an art store that you paint.

They had a lot of these sort of trees that were decorated inside. This is inside the lobby area. The attraction to the hotel are the three huge indoor gardens that are really neat. They are so big you feel like you are outside because they have buildings inside of them (that always freaks me out, buildings inside of buildings.)