Nashville: The pedal tavern
So a few of my high school friends hopped in a car and made our way down to Nashville for some bachelorette fun. If you find yourself in music city, you 100% ABSOLUTELY need to book a tour on the pedal tavern! It’s a 16 person bike that you can drink on. For $30/person, you bring your own drinks and do a little bike/bar crawl through broadway, or midtown. I’d recommend this even if you’re not drinking. It’s just a super fun way to see the city.
Here are some tips that will help make the most of your pedal tavern tour.
- Wear shoes that stay on your feet! I opted to wear flats which fell off 5 minutes into my intense pedalling. My shoe got run over by a car, but one of other girls jumped off het bike to retrieve it for me. To avoid that happening again, I biked the rest of the tour with just bare socks. Pedals with no shoes = not good times.
- Premix your drinks or bring cans. You leave your drinks in a cooler and only the people sitting in the back seat can really access them. Having them pass down a can or a bottle is easy. Having them pass down liquor, ice, and mix is much more difficult. *Remember though that you can’t bring glass on the bike. We bought a case of water so we could fill the bottles with our drinks.
- Book early for weekends! We booked 2 weeks in advance and could only get the 5:15pm spot on the Friday. Saturday was completely sold out. Although 5:15 gave us a lot of time to go out afterwards, all the bars we stop at on the way were a little empty. I’d recommend starting your tour between 7:30 and 8:15 so that you can go for dinner before hand, get a solid pre-drink happening on the bike, and still have time to hit up the popular bars afterwards.
- We stopped at the Swinging Doors and Bootleggers inn on our tour. We were given wrist bands and coupons for 2 for 1 drinks and other specials. Pace yourself. We went real hard and were a little burnt out by midnight.
- Only some of the seats were adjustable. I’m a little shorty so I got one of the adjustable seats but even my 5’5ish friends were commenting that they had to extend their legs the whole way to pedal which was exhausting.
- The bike is SERIOUSLY hard to pedal. 16 girls, with drinks, up hills… we were probably moving at negative 5 km/hour. But the slow speed gave us time to really take in the view as we rode up and down broadway.
- Bring something that plays music. They have an AV plug that you can stick your mp3 or phone into. We didn’t bring music but luckily our driver/guide had a bachelorette playlist already made.
- There is no motor. For real. You have to pedal up that hill.
- There’s not much space on the counter except a little cup holder. Everything else will need to be tucked in the overhead compartment that isn’t easily accessible or in your purse. As cute as our little props were. Carrying them the whole time is a real pain in the butt.
All in all, it was a super fun night. Even our pregnant friend loved it! If you’re interested in seeing more, you can check out this horrible video that I took while on the bike.