Fasten Your Seat Belts

If this whole architecture thing doesn't work out and I find myself in need of a career to fall back on, I could quite possibly go into the chauffeuring business. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm a bad driver. Oh pshaw! While that may or may not be true, I successfully managed to haul around my mother, my two aunts and two of my cousins in a ginormous Escalade all weekend without any sort of incidents. I even parked the shiny red exhaust chuffin' beast numerous times. Go me.

My mom and her sisters are a hoot. No, really they are. All of us females on my mom's side of the family are very much alike in our humor, outlook, and opinions. You can bet yer buttons it's gonna be an entertaining time when my mom and her sisters get together.

So, my mom's youngest sister had the great idea to do a Summer Road Trip. She persuaded her two daughters, my mother and my other aunt to truck on down to Nashville for a weekend visit.

I inherited my directional disability from my mom's side of the family and sadly nearly all of us are afflicted with this lack of navigational skill (except Bethany). Five women, five cell phones, four maps, two GPS systems and they STILL had trouble getting from Erie to Nashville. *shrug* It's the burden of my people.

Once they arrived and got settled in to their hotel, I gave them explicit directions to my place and amazingly enough they showed up only three hours later! No, I'm kidding of course. It only took them two hours. Ha! Kidding again...I just amuse myself. No, seriously, they had little to no difficulty navigating their way from their hotel to my house. I gave them the grand tour and then we spent a good chunk of time talking and being amused by my cats.

Once my cats became bored with us (which actually takes longer than you might think), I took my family to The Station Inn. The Station Inn is a very ... um ... authentic, live bluegrass venue. It's old, it boasts a rich bluegrass history, it's smoke free, and just a really down-to-earth, fun atmosphere. I like it. And my family seemed to like it as well. It was an interesting culture contrast for my 20 year old cousin who goes to school in LA.

After hauling their sleepy butts back to the hotel, I hauled my own sleepy butt (in the giant automobile) back to my house with plans to pick the gang up at 9-ish in the morning for some plantation fun. That's right, plantation fun!

Okay, so maybe plantations aren't really that exciting...but the Belle Meade Plantation is a neat old place to wander around. We were on the first tour of the morning and it was painfully evident that our tour guide was recovering from a Friday night hangover. As in, "okay, any questions in this room? no? okay, on we go!" We're walking...we're walking...

After being hustled by the hungover tour guide, we climbed back into the tank and drove downtown to the Frist Art Museum. The main exhibit there right now is called Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975. This is awesome because the collection includes Mark Rothko who is one of my favorite artists.

I love art museums. But I realize that not everyone does, so I try not to push my art enthusiasm on people. And I know...yes, know, my mother does not particularly like art museums. I swear she has told me this before, but last weekend she assured me, "I do too like art museums!" So while my cousins and I strolled leisurely through the maze of color, my alleged art-luvin' mama zipped through the galleries like it was some kind of Olympic event claiming, "I only stop and look if I see something I like". She's a funny lil' thing.

We ate lunch at the museum cafe which was very tasty. Actually, I find this to be true of most museum cafes - the fare they offer tends to be good, interesting, and inexpensive. Yay for museum cafes!

After some quality time spent napping, reading and lounging by the pool at the hotel, we went downtown to walk around Broadway and stopped in at Roberts Western World to wet our whistle and listen to a bit of music.

Then we loaded back into the beast and went uptown to West End and Centennial Park where they were having a big band dance. Centennial park is sort of a miniature-sized Central Park, and is really such a nice urban green space. Here's the three sisters in front of the pond:



We wrapped up the road trip visit with dinner at Rumba. I dropped them off at their hotel, left them with their gigantic vehicle, some Google directions, and bid them a fond farewell. I like having visitors - it's fun to show off my town to an appreciative audience. So, if you're lookin' for a road trip destination, look no further! Just give me a call.