Road Trip 2010! Days 8 and 9 / Nashville and Murfreesboro, Tennessee

We hauled ourselves out of our comfy beds and hit the road for Nashville. First, however, we stopped in Café Du Monde for chicory and beignets before hitting the road. I still haven’t gotten used to the whole “summer thunderstorm”  thing, so having to run through the rain to our car at 8 AM with breakfast in hand was a little strange. While we enjoyed our strong little coffees and powder sugar-covered breakfast pastries, we sped along I-10 toward Nashville and Bam Pepper.

The drive through Mississippi and Alabama was rather uneventful. For the most part, all you can see from the road is a wall of thirty foot tall trees on either side of the road for as long as the eye can see paired with very little change in elevation. We did have the pleasure of stopping in Laurel, MS to switch drivers and in Tuscaloosa, AL to buy groceries at the (gasp) Walmart Supercenter. Aside from the University of Alabama Crimson Tide shop in the Walmart, it was pretty much like every other store I’ve ever been in. Once we crossed the Tennessee border the drive got a little more interesting because Tennessee actually had hills, which created a lot of cool road cuts that exposed layers of rock. The geology geek in me enjoyed this tremendously.

We got into Murfreesboro around 6 to a raging thunderstorm that knocked all of the traffic signals out and gave us the experience of fighting through traffic all the way across town. We go to Bam’s place and hung out for a while before realizing that we hadn’t eaten anything since about 1 and started to size up our dinner options. Although we’d gotten some food on the way, turkey and ham sandwiches didn’t seem too appetizing. .I’d realized that I still had not been to a Cracker Barrel, something which several people on my team informed me that I had to experience. When Bam’s roommate Mallory revealed that she worked at a Cracker Barrel and could get us 35% off dinner, the deal was sealed.

Cracker Barrel is an experience for sure. When you come in, you go through a little country store that sells all kinds of knick-knacks and food items, then get seated in the restaurant. I looked at the menu and had no idea what to order, so Mallory ordered for us and we shared the food. Chicken tenders smothered in cheddar cheese and bacon with mash potatoes, country green beans and steak fried. Need I saw more? The food was delicious, greasy and very Southern. We left with a healthy amount of leftovers and hung out at Bam’s house that evening while planning out our day.

The next morning we left to go to the Adventure Science Center in Nashville. This place was basically like the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and we all had a great time looking around at the exhibits. We also were definitely the oldest people there that weren’t attending to their small children. As a team we dominated the pathogens vs anthrocytes laser game and ran around checking out the myriad hands-on displays, all of which were clearly designed for children. So much fun!

Another great thing about the Adventure Science Center was that it had the AC blazing. Seriously, blazing. I’d noticed it upon entering, but it became even more obvious when we left at around noon and it was 95º with 60% humidity outside. Ewww. We resolved to go downtown and see some of the city during the afternoon before heading back to Murfreesboro to have dinner with Bam’s family. We focused on the state capitol and Bicentennial Park, which worked well because the capitol building was air conditioned.

People in Tennessee love Andrew Jackson, James K Polk and Andrew Johnson. Those guys were everywhere in the capitol building: murals, busts, plaques, statues. The capitol building is also built on top of a huge hill, completely out of limestone and granite, and constructed with slave and convict labor. Despite that, it is a beautiful building. After checking out the building we walked down to the Bicentennial Mall, which is a park built in 1996 to celebrate the 200^th anniversary of Tennessee’s statehood. We walked around and looked at the displays about the various counties, geologic area, and historic figures from Tennessee while trying not to succumb to an impending heat stroke. After a little bit we decided that the profuse sweating wasn’t worth seeing the park, so we drove back out to Murfreesboro to shower up and go to dinner with Bam and her family for her birthday.

We went to Old Chicago, which features deep dish pizza and over 100 beers on tap. We ate a ridiculous amount of pizza and met her aunts and one of her cousins. Afterwards we went back to Bam’s house and played a little bit of beer pong before heading to bed early to head out to the Great Smokies in the morning.