Downtown Nashville

We left Alexandria on Friday, December 9.  We were supposed to leave around 1 PM, but we didn't actually leave until 9 PM.  We had over estimated the capacity of our new bigger car and even with Albert's expert cramming of all our belongings, we couldn't fit our stroller in there.  Luckily we remembered that our friend Laura who has saved us too many times to count, was traveling to Oklahoma City for work and would be there the day we arrived.  We swung by their house and she graciously accepted the job of gate checking it for us.  She's a saint.

We called Albert's sister, Melina, who is on bed rest to find our hotel rooms for us.  To leave this sort of planning out all together is totally unlike us and just goes to show just how busy we were those last two weeks.  It worked out fine, however, and Albert worked on his negotiating skills at each hotel seeing what sort of discounts we could get.

We didn't get to bed in Roanoke until about 2:30 AM and then Quentin was up with chest congestion.  We did make up for our lost sleep the next day since we were sharing a hotel room with Quentin who likes to go to bed early we decided to hit the hay ourselves.  Quentin was a good little traveler and slept most of the time.  We tried to take breaks and left for the day around nap time so he'd have time to crawl around in the mornings.  We got much more prepared when taking him to restaurants which helped.

After Roanoke we drove to Nashville to see what we could see.  After church we went downtown to a BBQ place that was highly rated according to Melina's research called Jack's Bar-B-Que.  It was good.  Nashville is a great place to hear live music.  It was a Sunday afternoon and every bar on the street had a live band playing.  I was amazed.  We passed by four or five different places in a row and all had a country music band playing in the front.  It wasn't too hard finding a free parking place despite that large number of people gathered to watch the Tennessee NFL game going on nearby.