In which Sid and Doris travel from Missouri, cross the Mississippi to Illinois, drive through rural Kentucky and Tennessee to Nashville and wonder why.
We didn’t mention yesterday that our hotel (another Marriott Courtyard) is a converted bank. The floor with our room on has preserved the look of the original offices with some doors cleverly blanked off. It’s a great building with nice staff too.
And we liked Cape Girardeau as a town. We leave past a happy mural saying that YOU are my sunshine. The Cape Girardeau town website is here and has better pictures of the Mississippi than we can take.
The drive over the 2003 Mississippi Bridge was a big start to the day. It is a very big river with barge traffic like the Danube, only bigger. The parapets on the bridge did not lend themselves to good photos of the river but as we tried, here they are:
We are in Nascar territory and there are cars on sticks. There are no more cigarette factory visits but at Winston Salem there is a Nascar museum. All along our route the teams have been playing away or the race has been somewhere else. We will have to come back for a better-organised visit including sports of all sorts.
We have also come across a political watershed, and see our first non-defaced (if tatty) Trump/Pence poster.
And talking of watersheds, we are now in the land of unwanted vegetation. This is possibly the first time on the trip when we have seen weeds running roughshod over human endeavours. Again we are thinking of the pioneers going westwards, finding that land is plentiful and (post native-Americans) free but harder and harder to farm.
All day we were on small roads, early on past Thebes, Cairo and later Palmyra. What classical coves those colonists were. Both Cairos have seen better days, as for Palmyra….
Our next big crossing of the day is the 1938 cantilever girder bridge over the Ohio River, taking us from Illinois into Kentucky. Here again major river traffic. (Nashville is on the Cumberland and from our roof-top bar we’ve just seen a tug and barges go by.)
For the full bridge day we offer the railway up on trestles rather than an embankment. And that is enough bridges – Ed.
While demand for tobacco is much reduced we see a couple of trailer loads in Kentucky. There is a lot of cannabis on offer here. Why be shy about tobacco?
There are no set piece visits today until we get onto the party streets of Nashville. But if you are coming with us then here is what we saw as we stayed off the main roads driving through rural Kentucky and then Tennessee.
We saw a vicious pre-social-media publicity battle being fought between Paul’s Towing And Recovery and Burl’s ditto.
Just into Tennessee we drive into Paris Landing Park to look across the wide Tennessee River and see the swoopy new bridge over Kentucky Lake. Nearby we found this collection of tricycles, several in Candy Apple Metal Flake like S’s. We see more people being buried, in lawned cemetery fields without walls or fences.
And yet in this unfenced land we also see the first examples of really expensive ranch fences.
The Promised Land of Nashville appears on the horizon.
We are staying in another hotel converted from a bank, and this one is good too as well as central. Just down 4th Street Doris frightens a parking garage manager into rebuilding his IT system so as to offer two days’ pre-booked parking for the JGG at prices rather less than proposed by Marriott.
Once we go out downtown we find that Broadway, Nashville, is an update of ideas by Dante and Hieronymus Bosch to include great heat. The streets are alive with converted school buses made open like floats at a fete, filled with hen parties drinking, dancing and singing. Why is this not just charming, or even sexy? The bars all have a rock/pop band playing loud by windows opening onto the street. Why is this not fun? It is about 100 in the shade, it’s not yet 5pm and the sidewalks are already crowded – a local warns us that this is nothing compared to the crowds after dark. It feels a bit desperate and seems to have lost the country vibe. It’s a long way to come for a horror show. Maybe Sid should be 20 years old again. And yet throughout the crowds we see couple after couple arrived for their Long-Promised Trip To Nashville, looking at the scene in silent horror and exuding the message “This isn’t what right! Where is the real Nashville?”
Escaping from the main drag our walk round town takes us past the headquarters of the Barbershop Harmony Society, the worldwide organisation for men’s barbershop singing. We would love to hear some barbershop, but there is no way that four unaccompanied voices could ever be heard above the amplified music.
Sid and Doris cravenly Google ‘Quiet bar in Nashville’ to find 13th floor views over the city shared with only a few bachelorette parties. Still no steel guitar. But tomorrow promises the Country Music Hall of Fame, an old car meet and then the Lane Motor Museum. Disappointment will soon be eclipsed with new joys.
DOOMPA DOOMPA DOOMPA. Cars crawl round the streets with stereos blaring and everyone apparently still having fun. The festivities come to a temporary halt around 3am.