Terry is a heavy user of the WhatsApp messaging app. Among the people she communicates with regularly is Ashley:
...who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Music lover that I am, when Terry mentioned she'd like to go to Nashville to visit Ashley, I was all for it. And then I requested - okay, to be fair, I pretty much insisted - that we also take a side trip to Memphis, about a three hour drive away.
In a way, this turned out to be two different vacations in one. In Memphis, Terry and I did the usual tourist things together. But in Nashville, I went off and did tourist things on my own, while Terry stayed and visited with Ashley and several of her friends.
As always, you'll see this symbol scattered throughout: (w) . Those symbols are links to Wikipedia articles giving more in depth information about places we went and things we saw, for those who are interested.
It was a mostly uneventful flight, but I did spot something interesting looking out the window. You know how sometimes, an aerial view of a landscape will resemble a face, or some other image? Like this "Indian head" image in Alberta, Canada, for example:
Well, somewhere along the way, I spotted this image of an eagle's head:
We landed in Nashville (w) , picked up our rental car, and headed straight for a pet store to buy dog food. Packing ten day's worth of dog food would have been awkward, so we decided to just leave it home and buy a supply when we got there. While I was checking out, the cashier asked if I wanted to sign up for their club card. I said no, we were from out of town, whereupon he asked "Really? Where y'all from?" And I thought, "Yup, they really say y'all." Of course, by the end of the week, I was saying it, too.
Nashville, of course, is one of the most musical cities in the country - Nashville is to country and western as New Orleans is to jazz. While I was driving into the pet store parking lot, I saw an old black man walking across the lot, wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a guitar case. I thought it set the tone for the trip.
We then drove to Ashley's house:
As I've noted in previous trip logs, there's much more brick construction in the East than here in California, and I notice it every time I go back there. Every house on Ashley's street, and a large percentage of the houses I saw everywhere else were made of brick.
We never met her neighbors, who had a pair of pit bulls named Rebel and Dixie. The dogs barked a lot, every time we came out with Kettle, but fortunately, they were fenced up in the back yard.
Once inside the house, we were quickly introduced to Ashley's cat, Mamacita:
Terry and friend
Kettle and friend
...the cat who thinks she's a dog. Not only is she more affectionate than many cats... she licks. When you pick her up and hold her, she licks your skin, just like Kettle always does.
We also met Kristin, a friend of Ashley's who was visiting at the time. Over the course of the week, we met several of Ashley's friends. However, I never got pictures of any of them. Shame on me.
We then went for dinner to a restaurant with the colorful name of Bar-B-Cutie (gotta have barbecue when you're in the south), went to a mall to buy Terry some new shoes, went to the store to pick up some groceries, and then went home and went to bed.
Courtesy of Google Maps, here's a map showing the location of Ashley's house:
Notice the proximity to the airport. When we would be standing outside the house, I'd see and hear planes taking off and landing. But inside the house, I never heard a thing. She must have good soundproofing.
When we were standing outside, we also heard insects. Lots of insects. Thousands of them, chirping like mad. Probably cicadas, or crickets, or something like them.