Roadtrip: Nashville and Kentucky

The morning of July 6th found us in Nashville, Tennessee. After reading about the attractions we could visit in Nashville (The Grand Ole Opry, the Country Music Hall of Fame, The Hermitage, or Belle Meade Plantation) we decided to visit Andrew Jackson's house, The Hermitage. If you didn't know that I'd pick the old house of some famous dead person as our one must-see attraction then you seriously don't know me.

We arrived at The Hermitage early in the morning and went through the requisite museum exhibition before heading through the grounds to the mansion house to await our guided tour. Poor tour guides were wearing long-sleeve period costumes and it was already blazing hot.

Oh, this crazy baby face. She's ridiculous. And she looks so different to me, even though this was only four months ago.
The back of the house. Andrew Jackson bought the home in 1804 from its original owner, Nathaniel Hays. Jackson spent little time at his home until 1837, when he retired from public life.

Andrew Jackson died there on June 8, 1845. After his daughter-in-law's death in 1887, the house was given over to the custodianship of the Ladies' Hermitage Society who still operate the house today.

After taking our tour, we walked through the gardens which were quite beautiful.
There were several other buildings on the grounds and the grounds themselves were quite extensive. We would have liked to have seen more but it was so hot and humid that we couldn't stand being outside any longer.

So we high-tailed it back to the museum gift shop where I bought my obligatory Christmas ornament (we buy a Christmas ornament from every place we visit) and decided to hit the road again since our time was already short and we had a whole state to drive through.

We took the I-65 out of Nashville, heading toward Louisville, Kentucky. I wanted to stop at Mammoth Cave National Park on our way. Ruby Falls had been a nice warm-up to the supposedly massive caves in Kentucky and I was looking forward to seeing what the park had to offer. (My original plan for our trip out to Georgia had also included a stop at the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico which we scrapped in order to see all our friends in Texas so I was anxious that we should get to see some good, big caves now!)

I had read on the NPS website that during the peak summer months, the park offered free self-guided tours of the most easily accessible part of the cave system. We arrived at around 2:15pm (I think), only to discover that the last "self-guided" tour departed at 2pm. There was an option to take a longer, guided tour, but that would have set us back a lot of time so we opted to just continue on with our journey. No caves for us. I did, however, get a stamp in my NPS National Passbook so there's that.

In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that we didn't stick around Mammoth Caves for a tour. They were doing a lot of construction on the I-65 and traffic was way backed up. We eventually got off the interstate, and took a bunch of side streets through the Kentucky countryside until we had by-passed the road construction. I don't know if it really saved us a lot of time, but I liked to think that it did. In any case, we got to enjoy a lot of the beautiful Kentucky countryside....and it was beautiful.

We landed in Louisville around dusk and checked into the Downtown Louisville Hampton Inn. We walked around the city a bit (I'll include those pictures in my next post on Louisville) and ate dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory which was located in this absolutely beautiful renovated Victorian factory.

All in all, the Hermitage was not my favorite presidential home. I wouldn't even rank it in the top ten of my favorite historic houses I've been to but it was worth a visit--at least for me--and I'm glad I can check that off my list. Mammoth Caves may have been a bust but Kentucky was not. I enjoyed the beauty of the Bluegrass State. More on that, later.