November 9, 2013

A road trip to Music city : Nashville, Tennessee

soundslikeknock Travel bachelorette, nashville, roadtrip 4 Comments

Nashville has never been a place that I ever thought about going to before. But I’m all for visiting new places so when my friend told me that she wanted to have her bachelorette there, I was pumped to cross another state off of my list of places I’ve been.

We decided to drive down to save some money. The drive from Toronto going non-stop is about 12 hours. We decided to drive leisurely on the way there and stop for food and snacks so it actually took us about 14 hours.

If you’re planning on doing the drive, here is the path we took, and some suggestions for stops along the way.

Toronto > Detroit > Lima > Cincinnati > Louisville > Nashville

Detroit – The Hudson cafe is a cute place for breakfest/brunch that serves pancakes, sandwiches, waffles and other breakfesty things (I’d only stop in downtown detroit during the day… and even then.. be more cautious..

Lima – it’s a tiny city. You pass a bunch of chain restaurants along the highway so if you’re hoping to lunch, this might be a good stop. We choose to eat at the Cracker barrel. They also have an Olive Garden right beside it as well.

Cincinatti – If you’re hungy for a snack, take a quick turn off the highway for some Graeter’s icecream. Yum!

Louisville – Cake flour (They were on that show “The Best Thing I Ever Ate”) They had RIDICULOUSLY delicious treats. We bought a ton of cupcakes, meringues, cookies, and other sweet treats.

If you want to have dinner in Louisville, a few other good restaurants in the vicinity include Mayan Cafe (Latin), Mojito’s Tapas restaurant (Spanish), and Doc Crow’s (Southern).

NASHVILLE!! We’ve arrived!! Here are some of the fun things we did there.

Southern Steak and Oyster

I’m mostly a beer girl but their cocktails here were really good! Blackberry Mountain Tea made with Ole Smoky Blackberry Moonshine, sweet tea, and muddled fresh blackberries comes with high recommendations! Two of the other girls got burgers and said it was some of the best burgers they’ve ever had. They do offer 3 hours of complimentary parking which we didn’t realize until getting into the restaurant so that would have saved us 24 dollars in parking.

Boot country – So it sounds like this place always has a buy 1 get 2 pairs of boots free deal going on. Boots range anywhere from $230-500 so if you can find two friends that also want boots, than it’s a pretty decent deal compared to some of the neighboring boot shops.

Downtown bars – There are a ton of great bars up and down Broadway. Just walk and stop into any bar that sounds like they have good live music happening. We opted for Honkey tonks and Tootsies which were both really fun and really busy at night.

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Pedal Tavern – Check out my previous blog post about how ridiculously fun the Pedal Tavern tour is. Don’t go to Nashville without doing this!

The Opry neighbourhood – The Opry Mills mall, the Grand Ole Opry, and the aquarium all share the same parking lot. I’d recommend doing all 3 places in one day if you’re hoping to incorporate them into your trip.

Aquarium restaurant – Lunch at Aquarium which was really neat! The only downside is that they don’t’ have a lunch menu so most of us only got through half of our dinner sized meals. Everything was delicious though. And the view can’t be beat!

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The Grand Ole Opry – for a live radio show. After a few 10 dollar drinks, I was singing along to songs that I had never heard before. So a trick I learned from going to blue jays games, is that the bars are way busier up by the cheaper seats compared to the lower level expensive seats. This was also very true at the Opry. We waited in line for 20 mins before someone came by and told us that there were no lines on the first floor. I can’t promise that this will always be true but it’s a trick that’s worked for me on numerous occasions.

Monster Block Party – So this only happens annually around Halloween but if you happen to be there during that weekend, and happen to like electro-house music… it was absolutely incredible! Steve Aoiki dj’d and jumping around and being surrounded by every kind of costume imaginable is quite the experience!

Nashville is definitely a city worth checking out, even if you’re not a country lovin’ gal!

November 7, 2013

Nashville: The pedal tavern

soundslikeknock Activities, Events, Travel bachelorette party, bar crawl, broadway, nashville, pedal tavern, pub crawl 0 Comments

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.