[The following blog has been back-dated.]
Saturday found us awakening to a beautiful sunrise, and a wide array of options. We exercised one of those options, then decided to explore some of the others that would actually take us outside our room. We discovered, to our amusement, that we had no idea what we wanted to do in Nashville, other than just be there. We decided to go get some breakfast and look for some touristy brochures to help us decide.

The Shoney’s Restaurant near our hotel must be the only one in the whole national chain without a big rack of brochures. This was a shock. There are some things that one feels he can count on in life … dogs have fleas, cats hate water, and Shoney’s has a big brochure rack! The balance of nature was clearly out of kilter here, and I wondered what other oddities we’d discover.

Back at the hotel, we found a brochure rack, in a corner of the lobby across from an old, out-of-tune upright piano. Yvette wanted me to sit down and play a song, but I reminded her that even if the piano were even roughly tuned, I haven’t played one in years. She’s always trying to get me to sing, she misses it … I sang to her a lot during our courtship. I promised I’d try … sometime when we weren’t in a busy lobby full of people whose stomachs might be weak.

Armed with fistfuls of brochures, we sat down to weed out the ridiculous, the expensive, and the cheesy. Then, realizing we’d weeded out everything, we decided we’d just go explore. We drove downtown to the riverfront, parked, and walked. We saw a riverboat making its slow, lazy way down the river with a load of sightseers. We waved, they waved back. We walked along at its pace for a while, enjoying the day. We saw a sign nearby: “The Beer Sellar: 99 flavors”. That was hard to resist, and since it was now past 1 PM, we didn’t. We perused the menu a bit. We settled, as we often do, on a beer purely because of the name, “Arrogant Bastard Ale”. I quote the text on the back of the bottle:

This is an agressive beer. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory — maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beer will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make a beer taste better. Perhaps you’re mouthing your words as you read this.

Despite its arrogance we found it harsh and completely devoid of any flavor other than formaldehyde, but the bottle was entertaining. Our next round was a nice Paulaner hefeweizen that was completely satisfying.

We walked around a bit more, taking in the sights and just being generally lazy.

We thought we’d have dinner at the Wildhorse Saloon, since it’s such a landmark in Nashville. We were walking in when the host asked if we were there for dinner, and we said that we were. “Probably not happening tonight,” was his reply, “the kitchen’s so overwhelmed we’re not even adding folks to the waiting list anymore.”

That’s when we noticed the riverfront stage and the temporary fences. We’d walked into town on the night of a major concert event on the riverfront, and the area was packed. We tried to get into the Old Spaghetti Factory as a last resort, and after wading through throngs of people waiting, were told that the wait for a table wasn’t very long, “only” 55 minutes or so. We decided that in 55 minutes we would both be desiccated skeletons with vultures wheeling overhead, so we opted to get out of the downtown mob scene in search of real food.

Working for a German company has taught me to appreciate good German food. We had found a German restaurant earlier in the day (it was right across the street from the Shoney’s), so off to the Gerst Haus we went. They didn’t have any good German food, but the place was overflowing with mediocre German food, and we were willing to settle. A local band calling themselves the “Alpine Mountain Boys” provided live entertainment. They were a four-piece group — drums, accordion, saxophone, tuba. I am no great judge of German oom-pah bands, but judging from the persistent emptiness of their one-gallon tip jar, I think they were probably sub-par. Entertainment need not be musical, though, and they were good clean comedy at its best.

Old friend Kirk called just as we were leaving the restaurant, and we talked all the way back to the hotel … he has finally found a girlfriend who not only appreciates his odd sense of humor, but actually rivals it. Nothing could have made me happier. Kirk and I have been good friends since high school, but because of his Navy career, we didn’t see much of each other for years at a time. His last few years in uniform were spent in Japan, which is about as remote as you can get and still be on this planet. After retiring last year, he lived in Louisiana, then Iowa, and now he’s in Boston. None of those are anywhere near Atlanta, but at least we’re in the same time zone now.

We finished the night with a relaxing swim in the hotel’s indoor pool. The lights were low and we had the pool to ourselves, it was very romantic and cozy.

What a terrific day!