Nashville, TN …and Party Busses Galore!

Whaddup Chroniclers? Everybody got their pin maps, ready. Today's Saturday, and it’s another travel day; we're headed to Atlanta.

Currently, we’re in Nashville, and yesterday we learned — well, I learned a few things. I was yesterday years old when I learned that Nashville is the bachelorette party capital of the US. Who knew? Certainly not me. Did you also know that there is a uniform for these parties? Apparently, denim hot pants and knee-high cowboy boots are a thing. Yeah, yikes. Also, Nashville is the home of pedal pubs. That's a thing where eight or ten or twelve people sit around a bar with pedals under their feet, with one guy steering and another guy serving copious amounts of liquor to this group of an already liquored-up band of knuckleheads and Top 40 music blaring from speakers that should be in front of a dance floor. Drunk people think they’re fun to be around (that I did not learn today). News flash, they are not.

We went on the Hop On Hop Off Nashville tour, where I learned something else: Nashville is not really that exciting, other than the honky tonks on Broadway and the BBQ joints around town. Okay, been there, done that, no need for the t-shirt. Take my advice. There is NO need for you to spend $70 for a tour of Nashville. All of the exciting stuff is downtown. Plenty of bars and music and BBQ joints for you to see and experience are all within walking distance, and they are all downtown. I, for one, am not interested in looking at the outside of hundreds of recording studios where my favorite artists are NOT presently standing in front of. But that may be just me.

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It has come to the attention of this author that some of you aren’t sure who the players are. I get it; you can’t tell the players without a program. But you’re gonna have to accept some responsibility too. If you haven’t been watching The Chronicles since season one, you may have to subscribe and binge-read to catch up.

Here are the Cliff’s Notes:

First and foremost, there is the Head Barista. She’s famous. She keeps the coffeehouse in one piece. She does all the hiring and firing. I know this because daily, I check the nightstand to make sure that there isn’t a pink slip there with my name on it.

Then there is Cmdr. McCroc. He’s my BFF. We met way back when we were pup deps in the jail. Did I ever tell you about the time when I saved his life? No? Well, maybe one day, soon. He'll probably want to tell you that it was he who saved my life, but the story is actually reversed. It's long. It's distorted. It's ancient history. Cmdr McCroc & I go back to even before the HB, Mrs. McCroc, and his obsession with rubber nurse shoes.

Next, there is Dr. Francois, Samantha Stevens, and Stephanie. The Crew’s Science Officer and I go back to our days in patrol. We actually got re-acquainted when Samantha got with me on FB and told us that they RVed just like us. The doctor has made it his responsibility to make sure that we have all the right equipment needed and he’ll wrench on stuff when he breaks it. Samantha walks around wriggling her nose and letting us know where we wanna go and when we wanna do it. We also have to let the Francois know what the plan is and give the doctor a 45-minute head start. For example: if we want to be wheels up at nine, we tell him 8:15.

We picked up our Crew’s Engineer, the Professor, and his wife, Yoko Uno, at a campout. They showed up, we hit it off, and the rest is history. The Professor is our statistician. He measures the miles, computes the time, and points us in the right direction. Yoko? Well, Yoko Uno gets her nickname because of her many attempts to break up the band.

So there’s Cmdr. McCroc, Dr. Francois, the Professor, and all of our wives. Last but not least is Big Sis and Big Bro. Big Sis and Big Bro are members of our sister club, in NorCal. The HB & I met them on a camping trip, up in Oregon. At some point, it was mentioned that we had this trip planned. Big Sis got so excited about what we were doing that she talked Big Bro into making their first cross-country trip. They have a daughter who looks like a clone of Big Sis, that is, Mini Me. Mini Me joined us in Niagara but has to go back to work at some point. I think we’re kicking her to the curb around Memphis. Look, somebody has gotta pay for this, it might as well be her.

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Yesterday, right about sunset, the Crew’s Science Officer came out over the radio and said, “Hey, everybody. Let’s get together. We're meeting at the Professors. Bring a chair.”

We all thought, based on what seemed to be the urgency of his message, that he had some important science-type info that he had to pass along to the crew. So there we were sitting, he had our rapt attention, and he came up with, “You know what? We need to do this more often. Look at this view,” as he looked out over the lake.

He went on to say, ”We're gonna need to put our heads together. Figure out where we can find a spot where we can have this view a lot.”

Then he started to dole out assignments, “Professor, you and Yoko Uno need to buy a boat because we need a boat.” It appeared that Dr. Francois had put quite a bit of thought into this and made a few unilateral decisions. He’d decided that we were gonna need a lake view and someone other than him was going to have to pay for it.

This could get interesting.

Drink ‘em if you got ‘em!

One bad, one sound.

#coffeehousechronicles