Nashville, Tennessee

October 22, 2024

Julie had spent 4 years of her childhood living in Nashville (well over 40 years ago!), and she had not been back since, aside from driving through on the way to somewhere else. Not surprisingly, she found most of the city and surrounding area to be unrecognizable either by change or a lack of reliable memory.

Crossing the Ohio River from Illinois into Kentucky

Didn't spend too much time in Kentucky this time around

Our campsite was phenomenal--right on the shore of Percy Priest Lake, not too far from Nashville.

The campground was quite attractive

Nashville's nickname is "Music City", and it is home to the Grand Ole Opry. We did not visit the Opry House, but we did check out the nearby Opryland Resort Hotel. It is a sight to behold, complete with huge atriums (atria?) filled with gardens, waterfalls, restaurants, shops, and even a "river".

The main lobby

Quite the glass sculpture

Entering into one of the three atriums

The view behind the big waterfall

Workers were installing some special holiday decorations

Doesn't is seem that the Christmas season starts earlier and earlier every year?

There's even a boat ride

We got a chuckle out of the karaoke booth (fits one person)

Since we are not die-hard country music fans, we didn't have much interest in purchasing tickets to the Grand Ole Opry. But, we still wanted to sample the local flavor, so we found a YouTube of the 5000th show that we watched instead. The price to reward ratio of the experience was perfect!

Most of our stay here was pretty low-key. We visited Radnor Lake State Park which turned out to be a bit too close to the Nashville metropolitan area for our liking. We had gone on a Saturday (one of the big no-no's of retired life--always go to popular places on the weekdays 😉), and the first parking lot that we tried to enter had a line out to the street. After driving five miles around the park to another parking lot, we got one of the last spots available. The park was nice, but nothing amazing.

One of the annoying things about Radnor State Park was that no food was allowed anywhere, and there were plenty of signs everywhere reminding you of just that. So, after our walk around the lake, we drove to another nearby park for a little picnic lunch.

Rustic little picnic pavilion at Warner Park

After lunch, we drove to the neighborhood Julie used to live in. To say that it has changed is quite the understatement. We were fortunate to be able to see the old house just before it was slated to be torn down to make way for something more opulent.

Julie's old house

Lots of changes--new pool, less trees, lots over overgrown grass and shrubs. Some things still the same--the yellow shutters Julie's mom had painted way back in the 70s to match the kitchen cabinets.

This house across the street used to be a quaint little Cape Cod where one of Julie's childhood friends lived

We also visited the old church, St. Henry's. It has expanded quite a bit, with the old church now a reception/overflow area.

The old church

Looking toward the old church from the baptismal font of the new church

The new church

We spent the rest of the week relaxing at the campsite and playing a round of disc golf. We found a beginner course nearby (Ethan Page Disc Golf Course) that was mostly all par 3 with a couple of par 2s thrown in. It was just our speed!

Some random sunset shots from our campsite...

Rick's corner

In this week's episode of "It's Always Something", we start with a major component failure on our first day here. The espresso maker looked like it was working, but everything it produced was room temperature. Life without morning coffee is just not right, so after microwaving our "cold brew" and having breakfast, it was time to see what could be done.

Taking the skull off of the espresso maker provided access to all its brains. There was at least one connection that had gotten hot due to the plug not being tight enough, but fixing that didn't seem to do the trick. So, the multi-meter made an appearance to try to track down what component wasn't working. After much poking around, including disconnecting and reconnecting a bunch of wires, it suddenly started working again! Who knows exactly what it was (likely another loose plug), but now it has been working all week so we will call it fixed!

Once the weather warmed up later in the week, it was time to tackle a previously found issue. We had noticed water leaking out of the bottom of the camper when we were doing a black tank rinse at the last dump station.

Time for Rick to crawl under the camper...

The extra section of deck mat we turned into a door mat sure does make a nice place to lay down!

Cutting some tie wraps that stitch up the underbelly covering to allow access inside. This has been a popular spot for fixing so it was pretty easy access.

That white hose is the tank rinse and it looks and feels secure with good connections.

Not finding anything obvious by just poking around, we ran some water into the black tank rinser and the hose shown above was not leaking! Well, the water had to be going somewhere, so we checked the other end of the hose inside a kitchen cabinet where the hose ran. The culprit turned out to be a leak in the in-line vacuum breaker. It was mighty nice of the RV manufacturer to install that component right over the furnace 😲.

Not shown here, but the furnace is directly below the leaky vacuum breaker

The offending part

After doing a quick check online to source a replacement part, we found that there were none to be had locally.

Plan B: Perhaps all the vacuum breaker needed was a cleaning out. Maybe it got gunked up somehow and was preventing the valve from sealing properly?

Well, something definitely was in there...

After running water through the part, stuff was coming out of it. Hmm...looks like...bug legs???

It's a stink bug! The vacuum breaker no longer leaked after we evicted the squatter.

No idea if the furnace still works after this leak dumped a bunch of water into it, but luckily we never use it anyways.

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