Rick’s home is a great place for two couples to stay while visiting Nashville. It is modern and well-decorated, but also very comfortable. On the second floor, the king bed in the master bedroom and the queen in the other bedroom both have high-end mattresses. Both bedrooms have very nice en-suite bathrooms. There is also a laundry room on that floor. On the first floor there is a nice dinning room a fully-equipped kitchen with high-end appliances, and a living room with a TV that is about the size of Rhode Island. WiFi is strong throughout the house. In back there is a private and comfortable porch and patio. We enjoyed having coffee out there in the morning and wine and cheese in the afternoon. The house also has a nice front porch.
There is a large Kroger grocery store about 5 blocks from the house. A few more blocks takes you into Germantown where there are some excellent restaurants. We had a lovely meal at the Germantown Cafe. The best known restaurant is Monell’s, which has been around for quite a while. All of the food there is served family style. You sit around big tables and they bring out bowls of southern home style food - biscuits and gravy, field peas, flat beans, mashed potatoes, corn pudding, fried chicken, meatloaf, roast beef in gravy, slaw, pecan pie, etc. It’s all you can eat, but keep passing to the left. A new place with a casual vibe is Mop and Broom Mess Hall. We walked to the restaurants and then used ride shares to go back to the house after dark.
We didn’t rent a car on this trip, which turned out to be a good idea. You don’t want to drive into downtown Nashville. Our fares to and from the airport to Rick’s were about $25, including the tip. Getting from the house to downtown is about $8. (Of course, ride share costs vary with the traffic load.) There are a lot of Lyft and Uber drivers, so you rarely have to wait more than five minutes after you summon a car.
We usually walked as far as the Farmer’s Market (about 20 minutes) and then used the free Green and Blue Line buses to get around from there. The Farmer’s Market is a covered public market with a lot of tasty mini-restaurants inside, plus vegetable, honey, meat, fish and flower vendors outside. We had crepes, Indian, and Vietnamese while we were there, and there are also Mexican, Greek, pub, ice cream, hot dog and hot chicken stands. On weekends there are lots of vegetable vendors, not so many during the week.
If you are a runner, it is about a mile from Rick’s house east on Monroe Street to the greenway path that runs along the Cumberland River. The greenway is paved. You can turn right and go into town, or left and head out along the river for miles and miles. It’s all flat, so you can’t do hill work, but once you get out of town the run along the river is beautiful.
Gentrification is hitting Germantown hard and fast, and pushing back quickly into nearby neighborhoods - like the one RIck’s home is in - but some of the redone houses are quite beautiful. Nashville itself is bursting at the seams. As one tour guide put it, “the official bird of Nashville is the crane” there are buildings going up everywhere.
Of course, music is also everywhere. Broadway and 2nd Avenue downtown are lined with honky tonks, and in each one music is playing all day long. Some loud, some quieter, and it seems like almost everyone down there can play and sing really well. And we only listened to the daytime acts. We were too old to face the crowds to hear the music at night. Although everyone goes to the amazing Country Music Hall of Fame, take a moment to stop into the Musician’s Hall of Fame, which is a separate entity and devoted to all genres and the engineers and session players, the the Wrecking Crew, who have been the force behind the music.
Nashville is a great place to visit, and Rick’s is a great house to stay in while you’re doing it.