Enjoying Tennessee

As this is my last year living in Tennessee, at least for the foreseeable future, I’m trying to take advantage of all it has to offer. Nashville itself has so many unique offerings, especially in terms of music and a sort of living history of music.

I recently went to see Snow Patrol at the Ryman. I love seeing shows at the Ryman because performers seem to be in awe of the history of it all. I was in the back row of the balcony, but even there you feel so close to the show and the music sounds phenomenal. For those of you who don’t know the Ryman (http://www.ryman.com/) was the home of The Grand Ol Opry and has been host to some of the greatest music legends. Here’s the view from the stage that I took when we “performed” on stage during music camp.

I’d been to music shows in Nashville before, but never seen a Broadway show here. Sarah and I fixed that and saw Wicked at TPAC recently.

Then there’s kayaking. I hadn’t been on the Harpeth, which has a really easy 1 car option for a put-in and take-out, so Kat and I remedied that too. Hopefully we’ll go again. It took us awhile to actually find the put-in—it wasn’t very crowded that day for all the clouds and the high water level. While we were getting the boats ready to go this guy drove up in a big white van (no windows in the back) and we both had flashes of danger, but all was fine. Once we got the boats in it was wonderful. The water was really high which made the paddle quick. It apparently normally takes 3 hours, but we finished it in 1 hour and 15 minutes! We didn’t even have time to stop for lunch. We thought about driving back and doing it again, but chose not to.

The real adventure happened when we, rather I, tried to get out of the boat. Kat was all smart and went to the gravel bar and easily got out and pulled her boat to the shore. I, on the other hand, chose to get out before the gravel, hoping to spare my boat a bit of a scrape. So I found this area that looked like a take out, apparently not noticing the lovely muddy hill at the water’s edge. As I tried to put my foot on dry land, it slipped and I nearly went under the boat…but I held on. Then it was too precarious to get back into the boat, I was forced to persevere. I slowly pulled at the boat and pulled myself up the bank, slipping back half the distance I gained each time. What a sight, me one all fours dragging this boat, clawing for any traction I could find. Finally Kat heard my calls and came to my rescue. Standing on the grass, she helped to hold and pull the boat up, she did not even laugh at me, how kind. Here’s a picture of us after we finally pulled the boat up.