Back in September I drive with a group of friends from Minneapolis to Nashville for a four-day girls vacation. We were all friends in college and now that we’re all busy and don’t get to see each other much, we try to get together once a year or so and travel somewhere. Later, three of us would drive over to Memphis and spend one night there. As is becoming usual, I took my Olympus XA with me to photograph.
Camera: Olympus XA
Lens: Standard Olympus F-Zuiko 35mm 1:2.8
Film: Kodak Portra 400 & 800
We departed Minneapolis late on a Wednesday night, intending to drive all night and all the following morning and get in to Nasvhille by Thursday afternoon. The four of us piled in to Taylor’s car in sweaters and with the heat on and blankets everywhere to protect us from the Minnesota cold. It would be 50 F when we left and reach 95 F by the time we would reach Nashville. The whole trip is still a blur to me, just lots of driving, on and off sleeping, trading shifts of sleeping and driving and gas station coffee after gas station coffee and miles and miles of flat road and trees. The only notable landscape change aside form the heat as we went south was the appearance of giant crosses alongside the highway, stories tall, which Megan and I couldn’t stop laughing at. I didn’t get a picture but you forget that parts of the US are more like foreign countries than they are the same.
We arrived too early to check in to the BnB and exhausted so we grabbed a late breakfast/lunch at a nearby cafe. We would drink coffee and read Trivial Pursuit cards to one another off the box on the side of the table. We went to a nearby shopping area to escape the heat and picked up some pharmacy necessities and browsed in a book store and a vintage shop (I would later realize that Nashville has some of the best and most numerous vintage shops I have ever seen); in between we stopped to look at murals nearby and I would also later realize how numerous and wonderful the murals are. Then, at 3pm on the dot, we checked in to the BnB and I took a long nap.
When evening came we dressed up a bit and walked to a nearby bar neighborhood called Seven Corners for dinner/drinks. I was surprised to see we were the only people out walking, even though it was relatively early and while it was hot, the streets were virtually dead of people. That’s something I learned about Nashville (and maybe this is true in other parts of the south too) – that people don’t really walk to their destinations unless they’re tourists. Most people drive and then spend the night in one specific area and then drive or get a taxi back. We were only about a mile away but didn’t see anyone walking either there or back, except for one man in a wheel chair passing us as we left the liquor store.
On the walk too, I noticed how much I loved the porch-oriented architecture. Every house has a big porch, with people actually sitting on them and out enjoying them. Up here in Minnesota we don’t have such a porch culture. There were even some with pianos and places for entertaining, which charmed me immediately. The bar area we were destined to felt suspiciously like a converted neighborhood – it didn’t look like there was lots of entertainment but there were handfuls of people roving around going from bars that looked like regular houses. We picked one that we could hardly tell was even a bar until we noticed the door man standing out front, and inside was a victorian-inspired interior with a beautiful stained glass bar that I fell in love with immediately. We had cocktails and talked and then walked over to a record store to see some live music.
We stood in the heat of the back yard and watched a band for a while, but the stillness of the air was stifling so we went inside. There are bands everywhere in Nashville, and we just happened to be there on some kind of event week where they were even more frequent than usual. I would not have counted myself a country music fan before-hand and I won’t say I’ve changed my mind but it definitely makes a difference when you see it live. The poor front-woman was wearing white and looked miserable but she still put on her best show. The phrases ‘pick up my new CD!/find us online/follow me on Instagram’ would become ubiquitous later, every one every where was trying to get their name out their and pay the bills with music. I can see why so many musicians move there. At one point in my life I considered counting myself among them, but that was a past self and I ended up with a camera in my hands instead of a guitar.
Truthfully we didn’t stay long out that night because of the heat and because of our confused and tired 48-hours leading to getting there. We stopped at a liquor store on the way back and then drank wine in the BnB and played a card game I had picked up at the bookstore before going to bed. Worth noting on the BnB – Nashville is considered the bachelorette party capital of the world, and you better believe it. The BnB had a strict ‘no glitter and no makeup stains on the bed sheets’ rule and the sign-in was full of anecdotal ‘TRASHVILLE’ stories from previous tenants. We did not believe we were there to party-party but we would be proven wrong by the following night.
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