July 17, 2006: Nashville

This morning our boys enjoyed playing with Trent and Ellie's girls.

After breakfast, Ellie took Shayna to camp and Adena to daycare.

While I brought a pair of front tires from Goodyear, Debbie did laundry. We met our hosts for an East Indian lunch near Vanderbilt University. They described how much Nashville has prospered over the years they've lived here.

After lunch, we toured Nashville, starting with Vanderbilt and its expanding medical center, which is in the midst of much constuction. We wound up at Centennial Park, adjacent to the campus, where the Parthenon stands, befitting a city long known as "the Athens of the South."

Built for Tennessee's 1897 Centennial Exposition, the structure serves as an art museum as well as housing a 42-foot statue of the goddess Athena, which the original Parthenon was constructed to contain and to honor. All it needs is an Acropolis and a commanding view of Athens.

The building is billed as "the world's only full-scale replica of the Parthenon," but of course it's not, since the Parthenon is now a ruin and since we have no clear idea of what the interior of the original was like. It would be much more accurate to call this a speculative reconstruction. Yet however one chooses to describe it, it's an awesome, meticulously-detailed building, and it does credit to one of the most architecturally perfect designs ever realized.

The architecture of downtown Nashville, on the other hand, is a thoroughgoing mishmash of disparate styles - neoclassical (the State Capitol), neogothic (the Customs House), art deco (the Frist Center for the Visual Arts), and modern (the Gaylord Entertainment Center).

There is an abrupt transition to the tacky, brick-fronted, country-music-themed old town, which includes the famed Ryman Auditorium.

We strolled through a reconstruction of Fort Nashborough, the first permanent European-American settlement in the Cumberland Valley.

Behind it was moored the Delta Queen, a beautiful stern-wheeler steamship. LP Field, Nashville's stadium, lies across the Cumberland River.

Also downtown is the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which currently has a special exhibit on Ray Charles, who got his start in Seattle.

Inside is a wall of gold and platinum records.

They don't call it "Music City" for nothing!

After we returned from our tour, the boys went swimming with the girls and their mothers at the Jewish Community Center. This was most refreshing, as the day's heat and humidity were brutal. While they were gone, Ellie's parents arrived. Peter and Susan, retired from their work in auto parts and libraries, moved to Nashville from New York City a couple of years ago to play the role of doting grandparents. Since they live just around the corner from Trent and Ellie, they fulfill their duties very well indeed.

For dinner, our hosts made pizza from scratch, and we sampled some of Trent's home-made porter. We discussed obesity, and he mentioned that Nashville is "the buckle on the bacon belt," a pun on its common appellation "the buckle on the Bible Belt." He told us that consuming an extra soda a day adds up to four extra pounds a year, all other factors being equal, and that an extra beer adds up to ten pounds - probably because each beer leads to at least one more. They don't call it a beer gut for nothing!

We had ice cream for dessert. (If men get a beer gut, do women get an ice cream butt?)

Oh! I almost forgot Barley the watchdog, who is an alien, as you can see by his glowing eyes.

July 16, 2006: Lexington, Mammoth Cave, & Nashville

Six signs of the South we spotted today:

• Castle Farm, outside Lexington on Versailles Road (pronounced "ver-sails," naturally), whose crazy-rich owner constructed a full-scale castle

• A pair of billboards, one featuring the Ten Commandments and the other reading, “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?”

• Several Cracker Barrel restaurants and stores

• A gas station with three posted prices: one for gas, one for diesel, and one for Marlboro

• Obesity, due at least in part to an excessive fondness for Krispy Kreme doughnuts and fried chicken with more breading than meat (I’m the first to admit that I need to lose 15 pounds - and I'll probably gain a few additional pounds on this trip - but we’re talking about a lot more than a few pounds.)

• Southern hospitality

As an example of the latter, I offer the tale of our first, and one hopes our last, automotive mishap of the trip and the Good Samaritan who came to our aid. The car developed a pronounced shimmy over the weekend, but since no mechanics were available in Lexington on a Sunday, we figured we’d try to make it to Nashville and have the problem seen the following morning. No such luck. With a sudden bang and a ferocious clatter, the tread separated from our right front tire at about 75 miles per hour on I-65, just south of Elizabethtown.

We pulled over to discover that the tire wasn’t flat, just shredded down to the belts. We took the next exit and limped to a truck stop where a mechanic, who normally had nothing to do with cars, agreed to help us out. He removed the ruined tire, cut away the tattered plastic interior of the wheel well, and mounted the spare. We gave the man some money and our hearty thanks and got back on the road.

Despite the delay, we still made it to Mammoth Cave National Park in time for the final “Frozen Niagara” tour of the day. We were assisted by the fact that our route took us south into the part of Kentucky in the Central Time Zone, meaning that we gained an hour as we set our clocks back.

We marveled at the number of low-rent tourist traps at the entrance to the park: Dinosaur World, Haunted Maze, Yogi's Water Slide, Mammoth Cave Wax Museum, Hillbilly Hound Fun Park, Big Mike's Mystery House, and many other roadside attractions, including miniature golf, bumper boats, horseback riding, and dozens of rock and souvenir shops.

After we bought our cave tour tickets, a bus took us to the "new" cave entrance, located in a sinkhole some distance from the "old" entrance. We walked into the chill, damp darkness and clambered 250 feet down a series of staircases. We entered a large chamber called "Grand Central Station" since several passages lead into it.

A guest asked whether earthquakes affected the caves much, and our guide said no. He compared seismic waves to those in water; the action is on the surface, while only a few inches or feet below, the liquid isn't perceptibly disturbed.

Our guide also explained how limestone combines with carbon dioxide to produce carbonic acid, which acts with running water to dissolve the limestone, forming caverns and other underground openings, and with dripping water to create stalactites, stalagmites, and columns, which are gradually built out of calcium carbonate particles. (You may recall some of the fun mnemonic devices used to remember the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. My favorite: "When the mites go up, the tights come down.")

We continued through a long series of passages until we came to the high point of the tour: Frozen Niagara, a wondrous arrangement of flowstone formations,

and beneath it, the Drapery Room, filled with stalactites, stalagmites, and flowstone.

Many of the rock formations were discolored from years of human intrusion into their ecosystem. At over 360 miles of surveyed routes, Mammoth Cave is by far the largest cave system in the world, so our 90-minute tour covered less than one percent of its total distance.



Just before we crossed into the Volunteer State, we bought gas for the lowest price we’ve found so far: $2.78 a gallon, which is somewhat surprising considering the newest turmoil in the Middle East between Israel and Lebanon.

At about 9 p.m., Debbie’s cousin Trent and his wife Ellie welcomed us to their Nashville neighborhood, a place of broad lawns and gracious homes. Trent is a physician who practices pediatrics and internal medicine at Vanderbilt University, where he also researches and teaches biomedical informatics (a subject Debbie is interested in pursuing). Ellie is a lawyer who administers the Tennessee Space Grant Consortium, an educational grant from NASA, also at Vanderbilt.

Trent's pediatric skills were put to immediate use, as Danny had picked up a tick on his arm at some point during the day. The bug came off painlessly and bloodlessly.

Trent is a fanatical runner and, like Meryl, something of a fitness nut. He is currently planning to participate in Colorado's Pike’s Peak Marathon in August. This is an even more gruelling race than the Jungfrau Marathon in Switzerland, which we attended a few years ago with the family of a Bernese friend and competitor. While the Jungfrau bills itself as the toughest marathon in the world, it ascends just 5,000 feet over 26 miles; the Pike's Peak climbs more than 7,700 feet in half that distance, whereupon runners must descend the same route. The Jungfrau is probably more scenic, though. (Trent is also organizing the Harpeth Hills Flying Monkey Marathon in Percy Warner Park, near their home, in November.)

If it's possible to imagine, Trent and Ellie have also found time to raise two darling daughters, Shayna, age 7,

and Adena, age 4. Both girls were already asleep, so we would meet them in the morning.

Today marked the 25th day of our journey, the halfway point in this seven-week trip. It has flown by!