Rhinestone on Rhinestone Action

Our Nashville adventures continued on the fourth of July. It was great because all the touristy places were open and parking was easy. The downside was some of the things that we really wanted to visit, like a hotdog restaurant and Jack White’s record store, were closed. It was a good thing that there wasn’t much we planned to do because we spent 5 hours at the Country Music Hall of Fame! 

It was tremendous, starting with the genre’s folk roots and moving through history to the present state of country music. Lots of Dolly. 

Tons of rhinestones. 

Wow. The top floor was more historic and we got through nearly all of that before we had to hit the road to Studio B, a famous RCA recording studio in Nashville that is now owned by the museum. That was a great part of the adventure because there was a really cheesy bus driver who drove us from the museum to the studio that requested he be called “crash” and a real country lady/tour guide with long flowing white hair. She could not work the Ipod that was used to provide examples of the hits recorded there. At one point she said “and this was what happened…” pressed play, couldn’t work the Ipod, and had to go get someone for help. She really left us hanging.

Then we returned to the hall of fame to progress through more modern country stuff that got progressively worse and lame as we got closer to the present. Classic country = yay, contemporary country = boo. Another important tidbit is our observation throughout TN that country fans are great because they are unabashedly excited about nearly everything and their enthusiasm can be infectious and is typically entertaining (very rarely annoying).

The next morning we wanted to get in the things that we couldn’t get to on the fourth. We knew Benek was tired of hear about our adventures with fried chicken so we went to a hotdog restaurant which was fab. Then Dave went to Jack White’s record store, Third Man Records. There was a special event at the record store so there was a line stretching around the block. The wild thing about this line was that it was comprised of a bunch of kids in their 20’s and several of them had parasols to protect them from the sun. This was even more interesting when you consider that the record store is in a rather shady neighborhood with a large parole center or some other facility. 

Very strange. While Dave waited in the hot hot sun to get a glimpse of the inside of the record store Renee went to a coffee shop (fiddlecakes). She ordered an iced soy latte. It was the most expensive latte of her life (over $5). It was not iced and it was possibly the worst latte ever. If you are ever in Nashville avoid fiddlecakes! Dave finally got to shop and picked up some really neat stuff. 

At around 1:00 we left Nashville and headed to Columbus to spend the night with Molly’s sister’s family. We were very excited about this because we think Mary and Chris are awesome and have heard tons of great things about their kids Max and Lane. Also, as an added bonus their mom was there. We ran into our first bout of traffic on the way there. We got caught in a few miles of construction that put us a few hours behind schedule. Luckily we had Renee’s favorite podcast, The Hater Podcast, loaded up on the computer. Dave did a quick transfer onto the Ipod (the country lady would be AMAZED) and we were able to bask in hours of hate. The podcast has been canceled for a while so some of the hate topics were outdated, but it is hard to ever grow tired of the shock of the KFC Doubledown, rabid Lost fans, and the endless sadness of Jessica Simpson. We finally arrived and had a wonderful time with them and got to spend the night in a house! And do laundry!!!  It was so great, we can’t say enough about it. The only snafu was when Suzy went out to get some coffee and backed into our car. Don’t worry, everything is fine! There is a dent and we will get it fixed when we get settled somewhere.

Stay tuned!