Day 7

First, I will get the less-than-happy items out of the way.
Sue and I try to eat healthy food, preferably organically or sustainable produced, when we feed ourselves. We understand that it is harder to find food like that on the road and that’s fine. We have, in fact found places for lunch or dinner that served high quality food. But Nashville seems to exist in a no-natural zone. We stopped at a grocery store for a few supplies (bread, eggs, some mandarins, that sort of thing) and there was not a single thing in the store that had even a suggestion of being even “natural,” never mind organic. Not even a bakery for a real loaf of bread that hasn’t been overly processed. We did, find a loaf of bread with a lower salt count than the others, though. Small successes.
Second, the glitch. As we headed into Nashville this morning – a 15 minute drive – the check engine light on Gallivan’s dash came on. Now the information we have is that this is most often caused by a loose gas cap (I know, I can’t explain it either), so the solution is to re-tighten the cap than keep driving (as long as there aren’t any other indications of genuine trouble. If the light goes out after a few miles, problem solved.
Didn’t work.
Plan B was to get out my DTC Code Reader. (Never mind what all that means, just know that it plugs into a thingy under the dash and shows you a diagnostic code number that you can then check online to get an idea what’s wrong. Did that. The code indicated a problem with the oil pressure sensor switch. Now one can perhaps drive quite a while with the sensor switch not working as long as the oil pressure is actually good and the engine doesn’t think that it needs to stop working because the sensor is telling it something’s wrong. But it’s a long enough way to Memphis (there’s a country song in there somewhere), so that it might not be worth the risk.
Tomorrow is Sunday, so we may have to find a place to stay the night tomorrow, then get a local Chrysler dealer to take a look at it on an emergency basis. It’s a good thing we gave ourselves a little extra time to get to Austin.
But now Nashville.
Let me just say that lower Broadway in Memphis is a party. I don’t know id it’s always this way or it’s spring break around here or what, but we were happy to have parked across the river at the Titan’s Stadium and walked across the pedestrian bridge into town.
The sidewalks are packed, the restaurants and bars are packed, the streets are packed, and all of it is insane. Every door as far as 6th Avenue overflows with people drinking and dancing (this is before noon and it went on all day) while live music plays loudly, pulsing with a fantastic country beat and full of the bravado and heartbreak of country lyrics. Little rental scooters buzzed all around us through the crowds and into the streets, while mixing in with the regular traffic were mule-drawn tourist carts, tour buses, and trolleys. And there were these amazing bars on wheels, some of them motorized and a whole fleet of them propelled by the passengers who pedaled furiously while singing and drinking and exuberantly shouting. Most of those seemed to be filled, for some reason, with groups of women, bachelorette parties or other groups of women. One pink conveyance with a suggestive name I can’t now recall, was filled with young women making merry and waving large pink inflated penis balloons.
Even the roofs are filled with bands and booze and revelers. On purpose. Most of the restaurants and bars have two or three floors of eating, drinking and music ending on the roof.
It was, however only a couple of blocks to Ryman Auditorium, the “Mother Church” of country music, and long-time home of The Grand Ole Opry. It’s a beautiful building with a story worth telling. We did both the short movie about the building’s history, and a self-guided tour.
Then it was a walk up to 8th Avenue and the Frist Museum of Art. The two key exhibits right now are a collection called Van Gogh, Manet, Degas and their contemporaries; and a collection of Dorothea Lange photographs of America during some of its most difficult times, from the dust bowl to the Japanese internment, the subjects of the photos are of iconic and always moving.
Then we ate at Acme Seed and Feed, where you order your food, seat yourself somewhere at the long tables and wait for it to be brought out; and headed back to our campsite. Tomorrow we will regroup, decide about Gallivan’s booboo and get along with getting along.
Nashville is Nashville, but a glitch is just a glitch.