Nashville Love

I have officially left St. Louis. But I have not yet started work. This is my final road trip/vacation before heading down to San Diego (sounds weird, right?), and I am currently located in the beautiful city of Nashville, TN.

I have held a particularly strong love of Tennessee for several years now, but I'd never actually visited Nashville. The Rescue on April 25 brought with it a full day of heat and fun but also a disheartened view on the actual chances that we would have a celebrity/politician come to support us--the only thing left to accomplish before all 600 of us were allowed to go back home. Nashville, TN was "rescued" in the evening and 14 people then drove all night to come stand with the St. Louis group. They were our reinforcements, and the most uplifting sight in many hours by that point. Over the following week, we got to know them very well and were sad to leave them in Wichita. That Friday, Brittany and I were able to see them again.

Back in May, not long after coming home from Chicago and getting a small amount of time to spend with our friends from Nashville, Brittany, Emily and I coordinated a reunion among ourselves and the Nashville Rescue Riders. You're hearing about it now.

It's always a challenge to coordinate things with people in the summer. People like to say that if they're not on vacation, they're probably at home or at work, but that's simply not the case. It's even more complicated when you throw several states' distance into the mix, a couple IC roadie internships, mission trips ending just days before your scheduled dates, and a lack of communication thanks to not having anyone's phone number.

This weekend, the three of us are staying with our dear friend Ryan Smith and his amazing roommates. We've gotten the tour of his suburb, seen several celebrity homes, discovered the artsy shops and consumed a great amount of delicious Nashville staples--Pancake Pantry and Mafioza's Pizzeria to be precise.

It's interesting to know so many people in one city, to only be there for a weekend, and to not see them for two days.

I guess part of the dilemma could be our sitting in traffic for an extra 2 hours (reason #19234729 why I hate Illinois). We missed out on seeing the wonderful Brandon Palma before he left with his family for the beach. And arriving so late in Nashville we then had trouble making contact with people, so we wandered around ourselves. According to Ryan, we should not have been on that side of town, but we had a great time anyway!

And walking up and down Broadway is insane. I have never seen so many provocatively clad women, so many groups of very drunk people, or so many cowboy hats--and apart from the hats, I live on a college campus and should probably have seen that quite often. Maybe I just expect it back at Mizzou.

I want to say that I love Ryan Smith's roommates as well. There are six of them living in a $1,000,000 house in the middle of the nicest, most upscale neighborhood of Nashville. They can proudly say that Martina McBride lives down the street and the governor's mansion is just down from her. Crazy. We have spent many hours talking with Mark and Andrew. Another one, Landon, came home last night from Ireland but we haven't gotten to talk much with him yet.

And how random can you be in Nashville? Well you can pretty much be as random as you'd like and so we were random even by Nashville standards yesterday.

We woke up and went to Pancake Pantry (not random) with Ryan for breakfast. Go there. It's incredible. Then he toured us around the universities, the park, his neighborhood, etc. and we discovered a strip mall of cool shops in Hillsboro.

He went to his mom's house to do some cleaning and housework for her so we were on our own. We stayed in Hillsboro browsing those stores (particularly Anthropologie and Whole Foods, which we went in no less than 3 times spending at least an hour and a half in Whole Foods alone). We tested furniture and designed an apartment. We checked out kids toys that each cost around $30 and which the child would probably not play with. We passed by the really upscale clothing stores save for Anthropologie and we discovered the Provence bakery. We spent well over 3 hours in that strip mall without buying anything. We did get the furniture catalogs though.

Next we toured Lipscomb University. Every door that we tried happened to be open to us, so we more or less got to see any part of the school we wanted to, which was all of it. Toward the end it was raining and we found a dorm building thanks to the lovely Melissa Carter. We walked around both the old and the new dorms and ultimately found the lounge area where we sat for several hours watching VH1's Top 100 80's songs countdown. It was an 80s day, too. That music was in every store we went in and on every radio station.

Lipscomb is beautiful and so is Nashville. We have plans today to meet up with Tyler, Jennifer and Heather. Still working on getting Litchfield to drive in from Chattanooga and Trigg to come from Johnson City. I don't honestly see it happening, which breaks my heart. Only 2 more days here until I fly out to meet my family!