GREETINGS FROM NASHVILLE, Tennessee (TN) USA
Tonight we are in the “Home of Country Music”, Nashville, Tennessee, and we have arrived back to a state we have visited previously, albeit in a totally different part.
We have full day in Nashville tomorrow so more about it then. Today, our sightseeing was in the southern parts of Kentucky.
After the storm passed last night, this morning was clear and sunny as we headed off south west on our drive for the day. Well we didn’t actually head “south west” to begin with. With the idiosyncrasies of the highways and interstates, you often find you are heading in a totally different direction to where you want to go because one connects to another which ends up being shorter and quicker than if you had followed local roads where you started which seemed to be heading in the direction you expected to go ! Confused ? Safe to say we ended where we were headed first – Bardstown.
The state song of Kentucky is “My Old Kentucky Home”. It is an anti-slavery song written by Stephen Foster in 1852. The song is said to have been inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and imagery seen on visits by Foster to his cousins farm in Bardstown called Federal Hill. In 1923, the state bought the farm and renamed it “My Old Kentucky Home”. The mansion is built of brick in the Federal Style, common in the US in the 1780 to 1830 period.
My Old Kentucky Home
From Bardstown we moved on to Hodgenville to take up our previous connection with Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s family came from Kentucky and he was actually born there – in Hodgenville – where he spent his first 2 years before the family moved elsewhere in Kentucky. He was born in a one room log cabin – not much bigger than your average bedroom ! Today a “symbolic” log cabin of the kind he would have been born in, has been placed inside a Memorial Building on the land originally owned by the Lincoln family, at a spot called Sinking Spring.
Lincoln home memorial
The Lincoln cabin
Next stop was our third National Park for this visit, known as Mammoth Cave. It is the longest known cave system in the world. It has over 400 miles of surveyed passageways which is more than twice the size of the next biggest in Mexico. Continued exploration is finding more over the years. We did a tour called Domes and Dripstones. The caves are a combination of limestone and sandstone layers. The first section of our tour was down over 300 stairs through tight separations in the rock. The next was a walk through various caverns which have formed from the collapsed sections of sandstone layers over hundreds of thousands of years. The final section was a major section of the caves we are familiar with – the stalagmites and stalactites and wave formations of limestone – in a section called “Frozen Niagara”. The caves are quite different to those we have seen before and although it was a good tour, personally, I think Carlsbad Caverns was a more impressive “show” than Mammoth. The lighting was fairly dim also so difficult to photograph. So if you are used to the type of “show” given by, say, Jenolan Caves, then if you were planning a US trip then Carlsbad would be my recommendation.
After our tour, we had a quick coffee and snack and headed for Nashville. We are staying in Downtown so we will be close to the museums and other attractions tomorrow. It is certainly a party town ! Probably to add to the festivities, there was a big NFL game in town today – the Minnesota Vikings and the Tennessee Titans. The locals lost so there was probably a lot of sorrows being drowned ! We had dinner at Rodizio Grill – a Brazilian Steakhouse. Not quite “local” food but we had already tried another restaurant which was booked out. It was quite an experience – the meats are just basically bought around by guys with huge skewers and knives and they carve you off a slice if you want that particular selection – beef, chicken, sausage, fish – about 14 different options in total. We then walked up the main street through all the revellers on the way back to our hotel.
Honky Tonk Central – 3 stories of parties !
Tomorrow we will explore the town.
Today’s Trivia – Not surprisingly, Nashville is a sister city to Tamworth, New South Wales !