Nashville June 21, 2016

We only had 205 miles to travel to get to Nashville and neither one of us remembered they are on the Central Time Zone.  As a result, we arrived much earlier than planned to spend a great relaxing day.

First stop was Belle Meade Plantation,

one of the premier thoroughbred horse farms in the South.  Horses like Seabiscuit, Secretariat, and every horse to race in the Kentucky Derby since 2003 can trace their bloodline back to Belle Meade.  Besides being a beautiful setting (the name means Beautiful Meadow), Belle Meade includes a wonderful restaurant serving unusual food you don’t find just anywhere.

Although the clock said it was 1 o’clock, our stomachs were on Eastern Daylight Savings time and they were very hungry.  That means we needed an appetizer to our lunch without hesitation.  We chose their Pickled Green Fried Tomatoes with some kind of spicy sauce.  This proves how hungry we were because Jim ate his share and never said a word about the spicy sauce.  When you are really hungry, you want something substantial and a salad, although sounding good, just was not cutting it.

We both opted for the Southern Meatloaf with tomato jam that is the best tasting stuff I have ever had on meatloaf.  Jim traded out the collard greens for goat cheese grits and molasses baked beans.

I hate that feeling when your eyes are too big for the size of your stomach and we made that mistake for sure.  To help eliminate that feeling, we walked around the grounds for a while and you could easily imagine carriages pulling up to the front of the house and footmen helping ladies in antebellum dresses on the walkway.  We thought it would be a good idea to walk around the Gaylord Opry Hotel but the parking charge has gotten way out of sight, so we decided to just go back to the park and use the pool.

We dodged rain most of the day, but around 7 pm it caught up to us ending our beautiful day here.  Tomorrow, back on the road.