Weekly Report | vol. 03

24 hours in Nashville: Erin's Version

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I’m not a city person. But this week, after attending a wedding in Tennessee, I found myself with 24 hours to kill in Nashville. At one point, Nashville was a bucket-list destination for me. But as I’ve grown, its allure, and the allure of any city, for that matter, has worn off.

Call it knowing thyself.

Cities are havens for “should’s”, “gotta’s”, and “oughtta’s”, and Nashville is no exception.

You oughta eat Nashville Hot Chicken. You should check out the Grand Ole Opry or the Country Music Hall of Fame. You gotta go get plastered down on Broadway.

None of it sounds appealing to me. I don’t drink, I don’t really like country music, I hate crowds (getting crushed in a crowd surge will do that to a person), and Hot Chicken doesn’t excite me.

I have this thing where if anyone tells me I have to do something, my impulse is to do the opposite. I don’t know—I just refuse to get caught in the flow of what everyone else is doing, considering most people are just drifting through life without questioning why they do what they do or if they even like it.

Doing touristy things is probably, in my experience, the worst way to experience a city. You’re kind of in this bubble that’s quartered off and meant to keep you out of the way of the people that actually live there. Sometimes they’re worth doing, but most often I find that tourist activities are just a caricatured version of a city.

That said, I also refuse to sit in a corner and mope about it, lamenting my hatred of cities like an asshole—I set out, determined to have a unique experience, to find hidden gems off the beaten path. A place where it’s novel that I’m not a local.

So with that, I’m shaking up this week’s report (because it’s my Substack and I’m allowed, gotdamnit) to be a 24-hour guide to Nashville: Erin’s Version. If you want to know what there is to do in Nashville besides brush elbows with bachelorettes at a honky tonk downtown, read on.