Nashville, Tennessee and the Grand Ole Opry

We visited Nashville, the country singers capitol of the world, specifically to attend the Grand Ole Opry.  We tried to visit this venue in 2005, but a flood had damaged the whole area, including the Grand Ole Opry building.  It has now been restored  and we booked the only show available while we were here on Tuesday night., June 20.  The entertainers we heard were Riders In The Sky, RaeLynn, T Graham Brown, Chuck Wicks, Bill Anderson, Danielle Bradberry, Dailey & Vincent, and Kelsea Ballerini.  Each artist or group played a set of three songs and this was live broadcasted on the Radio on stations across the country.  The MC who introduced the artists also provided the advertising for the radio station as well.  I must admit that I am not really a country music fan, but I enjoyed the entertainment.

Aggie really kept me hopping from one attraction to another as you can only see so much in one day.  We Toured the Parthenon, which is the only full size replica of the original Parthenon in Greece.  I am happy to say that I visited the original Parthenon ruins in Greece when I was in the Mediterranean Sea while in the Navy.  There is an art gallery inside which you can tour for a fee, we chose not to.  We toured Broadway Street downtown, and popped into a few bars with live music, including the Wildhorse Saloon.    We dropped by the Ryman Auditorium where the new musicians originally sang.  Those singers were very good, but we had a lot of territory to cover yet and parking downtown is very expensive.  The lots I understand are $30 to $40 dollars and street meters are $4 per hour.  We elected to park on the street, but only had 3 quarters which bought us 24 minutes.  We hunted down a local convenience store to get change for the meter and he would only give us 4 quarters, so we bought a $2.19 bottle of water and he gave us $2 in quarters.  We ran back to the meter which had already expired and fed the meter with our 8 quarters which bought us another hour.  We noticed that no one put money in the meters as the parking ticket was $11 (cheaper than the parking lots).  We returned about an hour late and all the vehicles along the street we parked had tickets on the windshield except ours.  They must have checked our street while we still had money on the meter.

We then went to the Opryland Gaylord Resort which was an impressive hotel under a huge air conditioned glass dome with restaurants, shops, exotic tropical plants, and water features with a boat ride all under this dome.  We also checked out the Opry Mills Mall to find a restaurant to eat at before the concert.  There were many restaurants to choose from, but the one that peaked my interest was the Aquarium.  This was a moderately priced restaurant, but the atmosphere inside was like dining inside an under sea aquarium with big salt water fish swimming all around you.  I would have liked to dine there, but we decided that we were short on time and had to get back to feed Buddy and take him out for a stroll before we lock him back into the motor home for a few more hours.  So we settled on a take out pizza from Papa John’s and it was terrible but it filled our tummy’s.