Take me out to the ball game, take me out to the game...

Wednesday 30 July 2008 to Sunday 3rd August

Greetings from Nashville, 'Music city', home of Churches ('bout 900), huge houses, huge meals and even bigger Mosquitoes (nasty blighters you have to beat off with a stick). Still wearing the bites to prove it.

Hey everyone, need to do some catchup here as we are falling behind and have since skipped onto Orlando and Disneyland, so I am going to roll all of our final days in Nashville into the one post.

As part of our agenda with Barry we booked some tickets to the baseball in Atlanta Georgia. We were to find out that Katie lived there in her college years and is a huge Atlanta fan which made it even more worthwhile.

We all loaded into Barry's VW for a roadtrip down south to Atlanta stopping off on the way in Chattanooga (home of the famous Choo choo). There was a massive 2 building aquarium there. One housed ocean marine life and the other consisted of river life of the Tennessee river and various river systems from around the world over 3 stories of the building. The kiddies got to pat sharks and sting rays in the rock pools housed in a rain forest looking green house, and dodge some amazing looking butterflies in the butterfly house. The rest of the ocean area housed some amazing displays of coral systems full of sharks and reef fish that you got got to walk in and underneath (it really did put Sydney's aquarium to shame, even though we love that place). Various points of the exhibits has tubes through the centre that that you could climb into to see things from inside the tank. It was funny to see the sea horse and sea dragon displays from our neck of the woods, brought back some warm feelings for home.

Next stop was the River system building, which housed massive ecosystems full of Rainbow trout, Pirhana's in the South america section and other native freshwater fish of the world. Barry and I were salivating at the thought of dropping in a line :).

From Chatanooga we made a further drive south into Atlanta and spent the night out at the ballpark watching the Alanta Braves play the St Louis Cardinals. Atlanta started well but eventually were overtaken by the stronger St Louis team. The result wasn't so important as the experience of being there in the massive stadium chanting along with crowd, seeing the Stadium and scoreboard lightup and having the traditional hotdog and beer. I even managed to get the a chant going towards the end of the game when most of the braves fans had given up on the game (gotta love that Aussie never say die spirit). Myself and the girls managed to impress Kate with our Braves caps upon our return the following day.

The trip home incorporated another stop off in Chattanooga for lunch and a drop in at the Chattanooga Railway station. Was a very interesting place, seeing the history of what was once such a huge industry and famous station but is now a shell of it's former glory due to air and car travel taking over. You can only imagine what these places would've been like in their hey day. Leaving Chattanooga that afternoon we managed to time in perfectly to drive through a massive thunder storm (thank the maker Barry was driving, crossing the road has proven difficult enough for me so far) which slowed us down a little but we made it home safely in the end. The foothills of the Smoky mountains though looked amazing with the storm clouds rolling through as we drove through them.


Our final days in Nashville were spent relaxing with Barry and Kate back at home and making a few new friends during visits to a couple of their friends houses. The girls have inherited some jewelery (thanks Kate) and a couple of new fluffy friends to remember Kate and Barry's brown Labrador Rocco who we will all miss. Taught some local kids how to play cricket and had the pleasure of hitting a home run at the local park during little league practice (and no, it wasn't kids pitching, it was one of the dads).

So, though I have skipped so much in this entry, that bring to end this leg of the 'musical journey'. We had blast down south and would like to thank Kate and Barry for their hospitality and for showing us around, it's much appreciated by us all and be sure to drop in on your next visit home for some reciprocal action.

Ohhhh.... by the way, Music City inspired me to buy a new guitar, picture below. Might get me a jumpsuit next :)

Cheers Damien