On a Front Porch Looking In

Wednesday we spent the day in Nashville. My Aunt and Uncle had the generosity of putting us up in their kid's bedrooms for the night. They showed us places to go in town and where to meet up with them later.

Nashville

We first headed to downtown Nashville, where all the live music bars are, at 2nd ave and Broadway. We walked around, going into some handcrafted cowboy boot shops, old country record stores, and where we wanted to go later that night.

Broadway

After, we drove past the Vanderbilt campus, and went to the Parthenon in Centennial Park. Nashville has the world's only replica of Athens' Parthenon, which makes for an excellent centerpiece for a really beautiful city park. Inside the Parthenon was an art gallery, and a 4 story statue of the goddess Athena. This would be cool enough, except for the fact that my Uncle Ben, who is an artist, works with the sculptor who made the 4 story Athena. After seeing the Athena, we got to go to his studio and meet the artist Alan LeQuire.

Parthenon

Athena

Ben's studio was very cool. He is a sculptor, working primarily with copper for his pieces. He came up with a look for his work of combining antler with copper in his work to come up with some beautiful bowls, spoons, candlestick holders etc. He was also making copper and silver jewelry for a show he has this weekend. He had some ingenious machines that he designed himself to help him pound the metals into the shapes that he wanted. He also showed us some really nice "paintings" that he had done by taking a sheet of copper, and fire blasting colored enamel onto the copper (because paint will get rejected on copper overtime) and then bending the sheet of copper into a 3D work of art. Alan's studio was equally fascinating, with large busts of famous musicians, nude sculptures, and this tree forest that was carved in the shape of human figures. With all of us coming from a science world it was really fascinating to meet people who do art for a living, and actually make a living at it.

We met up with Lael after seeing the studio, and she gave us a tour of the rest of Nashville. Following her in our car with her on speaker phone, we passed by Music Row where all of the country music studios are. The studios are small and unassuming, most of them in houses like professor's offices at a university. If a recording studio's artist had a hit at the time, they would display a banner of congratulations to the artist. We caught a glimpse of Darius Rucker's banner as we drove down music row. She also drove us past the enormous mansions of Big and Rich, the dudes from "Save a Horse."

We got home for dinner that night and played with the kids, Isabel (10) and Beck (6) outside for a bit. They opened up to us, and we had a lot of fun running around the yard and watching Beck do his skateboard tricks. It felt really cool to have little kids looking up to us and it felt great for us to be good role-models to them. I wish that they lived closer to the east coast, so I would be able to visit more often.

We ate dinner with them, where we argued over who loved cheese the most, which Beck won by putting the most parmesan cheese on his pasta out of all of us. They went to watch their mother perform that night, and the 4 of us had some quiet time to discuss our trip, and all that we had seen, what places we liked, disliked, and could possibly see ourselves living.

That night we went out to some of the bars in downtown Nashville. We listened to some live music and watched the Maryland/Duke game over a few drinks.

Snoozing thru the Appalachians

In the morning we drove the 14 hours back to Delaware, and got back home at about 2am.

Ocean City, Maryland boardwalk, 3073 miles from Sacramento

You'll hopefully hear from each of us 1 more time, as we plan to post a little personal conclusion and reflection to our trip.