Mystery Vacation – A Day in Nashville
After the late night we slept in and didn’t get moving until after 9:30. I confirmed that breakfast was served until 11:00 in the Club room so we got ready and made our way downstairs for our “free” breakfast. Once again they had a pretty decent spread of scrambled eggs (although neither one of us ate them because they were of the runny variety . . .gross!), bacon, chicken sausage, fresh fruit, yogurt with fruit and granola, toast, and juice. We discussed what we could do for the day and Googled some tour options, but found the one that we would most like to do was sold out. We decided to just head down to Broadway and see what we could stumble upon.
Even during the middle of the day it was quite busy. We came upon the Old Town Trolley Hop On & Hop Off tours and grabbed a map and decided to walk just a little further to the river to see if there were any other tour type companies. We saw a bunch of pedal taverns and other drinking type tours, but neither one of us were interested in doing that. We went back to the Hop On & Off tour to book only to find out that they were already sold to capacity for the day and wouldn’t have anything available until tomorrow. We had planned on coming home on Sunday so that wasn’t going to be an option for us, so we decided to use their map and do a self-guided walking tour. We were bummed that they were full because we actually like taking tours that give us an overview of the city that hits the major highlights.
We walked toward the Federal Courthouse and saw Grumpy’s Bail Bond next door. Eddie Vedder had mentioned this during the concert the night before. He said imagine you were having a bad enough day that you found yourself in jail and then to call for a bail bond, you had to call a guy named Grumpy. At this point I decided to pull up the geocaching app and see what geocaches there might be. I found one a few blocks up and wouldn’t you know it was at the Chet Atkins statue that was on the Trolley Tour map! I made the geocache find and looked for the next one. The next one took us to the State Capitol and War Memorials. The World War I memorial had an interesting statue that was also part of a virtual cache. We moved on to the capitol building and read some interesting history about it and then moved on to find the next virtual cache about the capitol. Upon completing these we re-looked at the tour map and found that at the Marathon Motor Works stop was the Antique Archaeology store from the show “American Pickers” on the History Channel. I watch that show quite a bit so I was very interested in checking out their store. This was a little bit longer of a walk and with the sun beating down it was a little toasty as well. We made a stop at the Publix grocery store to buy water and sunscreen for Tom. Although he wasn’t grumpy, walking around at the peak of day in blazing sun is not his cup-of-tea. We found the store and I was surprised at how small it actually was. Every item I looked at I wondered if I had seen them “pick it” in an episode. I only saw one item that was labeled from what season and episode number it was, but I overheard some other die hard fans talk about where some items had come from because they had seen it on the show. I decided to buy a souvenir 3/4 length sleave t-shirt that was on clearance and we headed back outside so I could find the physical cache that was near-by. I made the find and then we headed inside Marathon Motor Works. The building used to be a car manufacturing company in the early 1900’s, but now it’s part museum part shopping mall. We popped into a Distillery that was there and sampled 5 different whiskeys/liquors. They were all good, but we decided not to buy any bottles. Tom bought a boozie slushie and we wondered through the other stores. When we were done Tom suggested that we Lyft to an arcade place he had found called the Game Terminal.
The Game Terminal is a wide open building that had hundreds of old-school arcade games and pinball machines. I was shocked to learn that there was no entrance fee to get in and most of the arcade games were free, while all the pinball machines were $1/play. We walked through the place together and grabbed a drink before we wondered on our separate ways to find games we both wanted to play. I spent a considerable amount of time on Space Invaders. I couldn’t even get past the first level! We had this game as kids on our old Texas Instrument computer and I know I used to be much better than I was on this machine. I also made several attempts at Donkey Kong, which I also felt like I used to be pretty good at. I got past the 1st level, but didn’t make it past the second. I think when I was a kid I might have got to level 8 or 9. I’m not sure how many games Tom played but he was like a kid in a candy store. He did spend a lot of time as a kid in arcades and was lucky enough to have Atari growing up so he was familiar with a lot more games than I was. I did watch him play Track and Field in which he told me he would crush the high score on the machine. Sadly he could only overtake 2nd place. This place also had a very nice outdoor game area with shuffle board, bags, ping pong, giant beer pong, and large Connect Four games. We tried to play a game of Connect Four but as we were just getting into it, the slide came loose and all the pieces dropped so we weren’t able to finish to prove that I was going to win!
Having our fill of games Tom called for another Lyft to take us to a BBQ restaurant called Jack’s, that our first Lyft driver had recommended just outside of the busy area of Broadway. With talking to our current Lyft driver he recommend a different BBQ place, so we told him to take us there instead. At Martins Bar-B-Que we shared a combo plate of brisket and pulled pork and also ordered 6 smoked wings based on the recommendation of the Lyft driver. All food was excellent!! When we were waiting for our food we looked up how far we were from the hotel and realized that we were only about a mile and a half away and it was pretty much a straight shot back, so even before we got our food, we planned to walk back. After we ate as much as we did I was so happy for the walk. We ended up walking as fast as we could so we could get back before 7:00 to take advantage of Happy Hour in the club and get our “free” drink. We made it into the club bar at 6:54! The same bartender who was there the night before and also worked breakfast, was behind the bar. He recognized us and hooked us right up with a beer, and because beers are so expensive in town, we weren’t too ashamed to ask if we could get another before the first one was gone to cash in on happy hour. He obliged with no objection. We took our unopened cans of beer and the ones were currently drinking back with us up to the room so we could drink them later at the pool.
We headed back into Downtown one more time to walk by the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Music City Center and to see if there was anything else we felt that we had missed but should walk-by. I pulled up the geocaching app one more time and found one more virtual cache that took us to the Nashville Symphony building. Having our fill of walking and caching we headed back to the hotel to make it up to the pool before they closed at 10:00p.m.
At the pool there was only one other person around and she was walking laps in the pool. I decided it was too cool for me to get in, but I sat at the edge and let my feet soak, which still felt pretty good after all the walking we had done. Tom got in, but walked from just one end of the pool to the other and decided that was enough for him. We sat and drank our beer and discussed what a great day we had even though it was all unplanned. It really did work out pretty good. Since we were planning on heading home in the morning we made it an early night and turned in at 10:00.
Stats of the Day:
Geocaches Attempted: 6
Geocaches Found: 6
Number of Times Tom Said He Loved The Game Terminal: Too many to count
Steps: 21,396
