Summer 2009

This has been one of our easier travel days. We left Memphis around 8am and were in the RV park in Nashville by lunch time. Not long after getting on I-40, we left the flat terrain that borders the Mississippi and started into rolling hills. I don't know how many rivers we crossed over during the trip, but it sure felt like a lot. Some of the rivers meander so much that we crossed them more than once.

The Nashville KOA RV Park is located on a peninsula created by a bend in the Cumberland River just north of the Opryland complex and the Grand Ole Opry (zoom in on the map above or look at tomorrow's map for detail). We went over to the Opryland complex in the afternoon to pick up our tickets for tonight's show at the Opry. The complex contains a large resort hotel, a shopping mall and the Opry. We didn't go into the hotel but did walk through the mall, which seemed to me to be no different from hundreds of malls like it around the world.

The performance at the Grand Ole Opry was very interesting. Susie had not realized that the show was a live broadcast over WSM, an AM radio station, and on Sirius-XM satellite radio. She was very surprised at the number of commercials until I pointed out that this is a radio broadcast. We saw the 7pm show which was a two hour program divided into four 30 minute segments, each with its own master of ceremony, one of the Grand Ole Opry regulars, and a number of acts. The music presented in the show we attended had a mix of the components of Country Music, Blue Grass, Mountain, even Rock and Roll which had its roots in country music.