Nashville, Elvis, Camping & More

My last post, the Fourth of July one, was a bit out of order. I began a blog post about my visit to Nashville and my second camping adventure, both of which happened before the Fourth, but I hadn’t finished it when inspiration for the newer post struck and I skipped ahead. So now we’re going back in time.

After the first few days of constant driving and moving, I stopped to relax for Shabbat in Nashville, Tennessee. My boyfriend Phil is here for most of the summer doing a chaplaincy internship at a local hospital and filling in as assistant rabbi at the Orthodox shul, so it made sense to hit Nashville on my way out west.

Who is Phil? You may ask. Why have you not mentioned him before casually dropping him into your last post? Where did he come from? Valid questions.

I met Phil in New York right before I started Adamah. That was back in April, and we’ve been dating ever since. I haven’t mentioned him because it seemed weird to talk about in a blog, to be totally honest, and he just didn’t come up until now. I’m not going to write a whole blog post about my new relationship. It’s weird! It seems like something a 14-year-old would do in her Livejournal, circa 2003.

So let’s just do a little Q and A to get this out of the way and then we can get back to the point, i.e., my trip.

Q. How long have you and Phil been dating?

A. Can you read? Since April. I.e, 2.5 months.

Q. How did you meet?

A. Jswipe. Shut up.

Q. What does Phil do?

A. He’s studying to become a rabbi. SHUT UP!

Q. Where does he live?

A. Manhattan.

Q. What does he look like?

A.

Q. Is it serious?

A. None of your beeswax.

Q. Are you ever coming back to Israel?

A. Okay, Q and A session over.

Now that we’re all caught up on me and Phil, let’s return to my chronicle.

IT’S HOT, Y’ALL.

America is currently experiencing a brutal heatwave, and as Nashville is already on the warmer side of the country, you can imagine how it is there. On Friday and Saturday, going outside was like walking into a bowl of soup. It wasn’t the most pleasant sensation.

I stayed next door with Phil’s very hospitable neighbors. I’ve only been inside these two houses, so I can’t speak for the rest of Nashvillians, but I was very surprised to find out that they keep their AC on day and night, including when they’re not even in the house. All day every day, the empty houses are being air conditioned.

I guess I get it, because it’s REALLY nice to walk into a cool house after being outside in the sweltering heat, but it still seems crazy wasteful to me, especially coming from Isabella Friedman.

Anyway, I arrived on Friday after a mostly pleasant drive from Asheville. It was my shortest drive so far, which made it the most enjoyable, plus it wound through the Pisgah National Forest on a very curvy but very pretty road. I had actually come the same way five months earlier, on my Florida road trip. It was cool noticing the HUGE differences between then and now. Then: heat on in the car, gloomy gray forests, still very scenic, but a winter scene. Now: AC and green as far as the eye can see. So verdant, so lush, bursting with life.

Not that I could take a REALLY good look, because I was at the wheel. Self-driving cars are going to be a game-changer for road trips. Imagine being able to marvel freely at the scenery, to nod off if you want to (I don’t really know anything about self-driving cars, maybe you have to be conscious while you’re in them), to use both hands to open a packet of chips instead of one hand and two knees. Incredible.

Along the way, all of my car’s maintenance lights decided to go on. Well, not ALL of them, but enough to worry me. Obviously I called my mechanic (read: Dad) as soon as I arrived in Nashville, and checked my tire pressure, but nothing was wrong. He told me to get an oil change. After moaning about that for a while (adulting is the worst), I grudgingly agreed.

It was so hot in Nashville that I had to sit with my car on and AC blasting while waiting for Phil to get home from the hospital. Even so I was covered in sweat. A car is not a nice place to be when it’s a thousand degrees out, even with air conditioning.

Also, I don’t know if it’s my car or my own various temperamental body zones but I simply CANNOT find the right combination of temperature, fan strength, vent angling, and airflow while driving in the heat. I can’t. I think I have adjusted one or other of those things at least once every minute since I left New York, and I’m only exaggerating a little bit. Either the air is too cold and it’s blowing on my face, or I can’t feel it anywhere, or it’s too warm, or it’s hitting my leg in an annoying way, or it’s not exactly cool enough but any lower is too cold, or the vent is too open, or it’s too closed. It is INCREDIBLY annoying. I just can’t make it work. And considering I’m going to be in this car, in brutal heat, for approximately 150 hours this summer, I am not happy about it.

Since I got here on a Friday, I didn’t have much time to see the city before Shabbat, but I did get to encounter a big chunk of Nashville’s small but friendly religious community at shul and dinner. Everyone was welcoming, and while there are a bunch of older congregants, there’s also a surprising number of young families. It’s not the biggest community, but it’s clearly vibrant.

Apart from shul, we stayed inside all day Saturday; it was way too hot to go for leisure walks. Instead we conserved energy for our night on the town! After Shabbat ended, we took an Uber to downtown Nashville to check out the honky-tonk scene. A honky-tonk is basically a bar with live country music, I think. Now, country music is not my jam, but when I travel, I like to taste the local flavor, so I was totally into it. Downtown was HOPPING! We stayed on Broadway mostly, which is the most touristy area. It was paaaacked with party people and bars, each offering some kind of live music. After walking down the strip of honky-tonks, we decided to choose one at random just to get the night started. The music at our bar wasn’t great - just covers of famous “country” songs we all know - but their liquor made up for it. We figured that since we were in the south, we had to try moonshine, especially since this bar’s brand came in such mouth-watering flavors as oatmeal cookie, butterscotch, green apple, blueberry and many more. Obviously, we tried they first two and they were unbelievably delicious. We couldn’t understand in the least how they had packed that much grain alcohol into something so yummy.

Then we went in search of a better honky-tonk. The streets were filled with people out on the town, a lot of drunk people, a lot of drunk students, a lot of people waiting in lines for certain bars. It wasn’t so crowded that it was physically uncomfortable, but there were a ton of people. And it was still crazy hot at 11pm. We went in search of a bar which had been recommended to us called Robert’s Western World and this is where we found that legit southern vibe. The musicians were awesome, they were playing real country and the bar had great ambiance, plus the drinks were super cheap. (A beer and a cocktail for $10!) There was a small dance floor in front of the stage and I was tipsy enough to be okay with getting on it!

Out on the town.

The dancing was chilled, it wasn’t like a club, and I was in a good place. It was a super fun spot and a really fun night - an awesome taste of the Nashville nightlife. And what was even better about it was that I didn’t have to experience it alone. Because swaying by myself on that dance floor would have been a little embarrassing, even for me.

On Sunday we went to The Hermitage, which was President Andrew Jackson’s country home in the nineteenth century. Was touring a plantation the smartest thing to do in the punishing heat? Nah. But it was still fun. Well, mostly. We had to wait on some lines, which was unpleasant, but we certainly learned a lot about Rock Star Jackson and his beloved wife, Rachel. The grounds were very pretty, and if you could ignore the sweat pouring down your face and body, it was really nice, though by the time the idiot narrating the fake duel had been fake killed, we were ready to leave.

Best part of the reenactment.

Sunday night we chilled out and made delicious pizza at home, since Nashville sadly does not have kosher pizza. In fact it only has one kosher restaurant and that one is vegan, and I really don’t see the point of that.

Monday Phil had a half-day at work, so after hanging out in the morning I left to do my adulting errands: get the oil changed in my car (success!), hit Target for all the camping necessities I needed (I have to say, I loved walking past the aisles of back-to-school dorm room accessories and knowing that those days were far behind me and that I was here for real-life things like hammers and tarps), and go food shopping for dinner, like any regular ol’ housewife. It was domestic and sweet and took forever. Why are errands so time-consuming?

Together, we cooked tacos for dinner. Later in the evening we went out again, this time with Phil’s Renaissance Man neighbor/my host, a hard-working father of three whose wife was out of town and who STILL found the time and energy to hit several local hotspots for country music and beer on a weeknight. This was the same guy who cooked Shabbat dinner for 18 people by himself, INCLUDING baking challah and cake for dessert.

He took us to Basement East, a club-like venue which hosts live music every night and usually boasts a few big names in the local country world, none of which I knew or now remember. It was a cool place: cheap to get in, a bit grungy, not too big or small, and not too crowded. I had worn my cowboy boots, which I felt were appropriate for the occasion. It wasn’t touristy; I guess one might call it a more ‘authentic’ kind of scene than the Broadway honky-tonks.

After that, we were ready to go home but our host convinced us to hit another bar with music, Winners (Who is this guy?!). It was smaller and more crowded, but pretty lively. It hosts the Whiskey Jam, a free concert-type thing, every Monday and Thursday. The music was good, but I thought the coolest thing about the place was a quarter-fed breathalyzer machine the bar helpfully provided to patrons. Don’t drive drunk.

Whiskey Jam

So I managed to get not one but TWO tastes of the nightlife in Nashville!

I left on Tuesday morning, after a sad parting from Phil. I won’t see him again until the end of my trip in August, when I’ll visit Nashville again before heading back home. Which is poopy. Between Adamah, New York, and Nashville, the relationship has pretty much been long-distance from the beginning, and that’s not going to change for a while.

But I’ll have lots of stuff going on to distract me in the meantime. In fact, that very Tuesday I visited Elvis’s birthplace AND had my second camping experience of the trip. Let me tell you about it!

First of all, Elvis was born in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935. I got to see that shack. I stood in that shack! In the very room where it happened. Where THE KING was born.

The place where it all began.

The King's humble beginnings.

The house is in its original location, though its address is now 306 Elvis Presley Drive, which I suspect is not original. Also on the site is a museum which interprets the history of the Elvis Birthplace, as well as the church the Presleys attended, which was moved from its original site nearby to join the compound.

The whole thing is very cute. I’m not sure it was totally worth the $18 entrance fee; I think I probably got about 12 dollars’ worth of entertainment. It’s a little hokey, a little cheesy, much what one would expect, but it’s also sweet. You really get a feel for young Elvis. According to his classmates and people who knew him, he was a super shy, super sweet kid who got his musical beginnings in church. It’s really amazing to remember that Elvis was born during the Great Depression - a really freaking long time ago! He’s still such a cultural American icon that you forget he got his beginnings in an era most of us think of in black and white.

The museum, as I said, was a little campy, but it was still interesting even for me, someone who does not happen to be a mega-fan. I mean, I LIKE Elvis, who doesn’t, but apart from a book report I did on a biography of him in elementary school, I just haven’t had that much exposure to the King. Still, I respect him as the mysterious, god-like figure he eventually became in the American canon of famous musicians. His career’s crazy trajectory; his fame in life; his death, so untimely and scandalous; his subsequent and frequent reappearance in ghost form; and most of all, the cult that he inspired.

What’s CRAZY about how famous Elvis was in his lifetime is that he actually bought his own birthplace to make into a tourist spot for fans. Okay, that’s maybe a bit of an overstatement. He didn’t buy the house, the city of Tupelo did in 1957 after it became a pilgrimage site for Elvis fans. In 1957, when Elvis was only TWENTY-TWO years old!!!! At 22, he had already gained so much fame, had already become such a huge figure in history, that the city of his birth decided to pay out money to purchase his childhood home! Elvis donated money to the project to create a park in the property for neighborhood kids. Elvis himself helped create the Elvis Presley Birthplace memorial, at 22 years old. That’s insane.

The whole Birthplace experience really only used up about an hour. Some of the site’s attractions were really stretching it, in my opinion. But I’m still glad I went. The problem with this trip, so far, is that because I’m driving and traveling so much every day, I don’t end up getting much time to actually see and do things. Which kind of sucks. Also, it’s so damn hot out that I don’t even want to do a lot of things.

Case in point. After the museum, I had to figure out where I was camping that night. I ended up in the Trace State Park, only about a half-hour drive from Tupelo. Unfortunately my second night of camping wasn’t quiiiite as perfect as the first. But I’ll let myself of two days ago tell that story, as I wrote out a semi-hysterical rant in my tent which never actually became a blog post so I’m squishing it in here.

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Camping, Take Two You guys, my second night of camping is not going as swimmingly as my first. Maybe it’s because this heatwave means I’m slowly sweating out every drop of moisture in my body as I sit in this plastic bag. Maybe it’s the bugs that keep smacking against my tent because they’re attracted to the light glowing inside. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m the only tenter in this small primitive campground, and I’m basically alone in the woods (though, to be fair, I am only about 200 feet away from the bathroom facilities and maybe 300 feet away from the RV campground). Maybe it’s the deafening sound of one million insects chirping away in the trees. Maybe it’s that I miss Phil. Maybe it’s that my skin is covered in various greasy layers of sunblock, bug spray and sweat and I feel very gross. No, it’s the heat. It’s definitely the heat. I honestly don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight. I just can’t possibly imagine how I can fall asleep in these temperatures. Let’s just pray that once the lights are out the bugs will go away, but if not, the sounds of their wildly careening bodies hitting my tent walls will freak me the eff out all night. This sucks, you guys. I realize that it’s summer, and I’m heading to the hottest parts of the country. Maybe this is a reality that should have hit me earlier, I admit that. But it didn’t and here we are. Pouring sweat in a tent in 90 degree heat in Mississippi. Somehow, I have to get enough rest tonight to drive six hours tomorrow. To be honest, I’m thinking longingly of that drive because it means I get to sit in my air conditioned car. When I arrived at the Trace State Park in Mississippi earlier this afternoon, it was obviously even hotter than it is now. I hadn’t made a reservation anywhere for tonight because most tent-only campsites are walk-in only around here. I actually called around to a bunch of different campgrounds this morning, but I couldn’t make any same-day bookings; I was told I just had to show up. So I did. I chose this park mainly because I knew it would have availability, and I didn’t want to have to worry about getting to a campground only to be turned away and have to search for another place. But it has availability because . . . it’s empty. There’s a small campground with sites for RVs and trailers, with electric and water hookups, which are more like the one I stayed at in Shenandoah, and two “primitive” style campgrounds consisting of a few patches of land carved out of the surrounding forest, each supplied with a picnic table and a fire pit.

My campsite. But I’m the only primitive here. When I arrived at the park I checked out the first tent-only campground only to find that it was entirely, completely, 100% empty. No cars, no tents, no people. I would have been the only person in the entire area. I turned around and went in search of door number two. The second primitive campsite is located pretty close to amenities - in this case, bathrooms and a stable of sorts (equestrians come here, I suppose, though I haven’t seen any horses) - and to the regular campground where the smart people, in their air conditioned vehicles, pull onto a driveway, plug in, and enjoy their home away from home. One camper even had a freaking satellite dish set out on the lawn. These people are lacking for nothing. And yet, a mere 400 feet away, a poor moron is sitting in the woods, sweating her butt off in her green nylon sauna. After getting out of my car (HOT) and walking around to check out the different primitive sites available (HOTTER), I chose the one closest to the parking lot and within walking distance of the bathrooms. Then I pulled my car into the site and sat in it with the AC on for 20 minutes trying to cool down from my stroll. Eventually, I got out and set up my tent. Since my last camping experience, I went to Target and stocked up on all the extra supplies I needed: tarp for the footprint, a thicker sleeping mat (really an exercise mat, same diff), and a rubber mallet. The tarp is almost the right size and I was going to cut it (footprints are supposed to be smaller than the tent bottom itself so that water can’t get trapped in them) but then I realized that the extra flap made a great welcome mat for that awkward moment when you’re trying to get into your tent without trodding all over your sleeping bag with dirty sandals. I set up the tent, added the rain fly, and hammered in my stakes - LOVE my new mallet! - and successfully figured out how to use the guy lines (extremely easy).

I'm getting the hang of this camping thing.

Then I spread out my sleeping gear, thinking to myself as I did that there was no way in heck that I’d ever get inside this sleeping bag tonight. I stand by that. Then I got back into my car and dried my sweat in another soul-saving, gas-wasting AC session. Worth it. I didn’t do much the rest of the day other than wait, in vain, for sundown to bring a slight cooling off. You know how I said the Nashville air is like soup? Well, the air here is like soup with lots of bugs in it. I sat at my picnic table, ate “dinner”, and read until my lantern attracted a large, flying beetle and I gtfo of there. At which point I barricaded myself in my tent, only to realize it’s about 5 degrees hotter in here than it is out there, the bugs are drawn to the light inside, and I will never, ever be able to fall asleep. At this point I’m even scared to leave my tent to go brush my teeth in the bathroom. What if one of the beetles flies in the second I unzip??!? Then not even the tent will be safe. I’ll have to sleep in my car! This is going to be a rough night.

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Okay, back to present-time. Ironically, after my very rough evening, I actually slept really well that night. Maybe it was my cushy new sleeping pad. Anyway, it’s funny that I slept so badly the first night of camping, when I was so happy with the conditions, and so well the second night, when I hated everything about what was happening. By the time I woke up, the insects had retreated, and all I could hear was sweet bird chirping.

I packed up my site (this is kind of a time-consuming process, it turns out) and left for my next stop, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I had a hotel reservation, thank God. I arrived there around 4, and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the room, but also feeling really grumpy about the heat and my hunger. Somehow, eating little bits of snacks all day instead of meals wasn’t satisfying. Weird.

But after having a cup o’soup and taking a looooong shower to scrub off the camping residue, I revived, and had enough energy to go into town for the annual fireworks show over the Mississippi River, which I wrote a bit about in yesterday’s post. Finding parking in a strange city was a little stressful, but in the end no problem, and I lugged my beach chair down to the riverfront, where thousands of people had already gathered to wait for the 9pm show to begin.

Mississippi Riverfront.

It was a nice, friendly atmosphere, with lots of families. Turns out Baton Rouge is very diverse. Families and spectators were black, white, Hispanic, Asian - and they were all mixed up together, sitting in one big unified crowd. It all felt very amiable. As the sun set and the sky darkened, fireworks from smaller, distant shows were visible, but when our show started it was unmistakable: 20 minutes of pretty fireworks shot from an off-shore barge into the air above the Mississippi.

There was no music, and I felt that the actual patriotism of the day was lacking for me. I hadn’t heard any Star Spangled Banners, I hadn’t seen a lot of flags. Some people were dressed for the holiday in red, white and blue, but overall there wasn’t a lot of America in the thing. It was really just a fireworks show, and that was a little disappointing for me. I regretted, a bit, that I hadn’t stayed in Nashville, where there was a block party on Phil’s street, followed by a concert and a barbecue. Now that really seemed like the quintessential American Fourth.

Alas, I had to be on my way. But it turned out well, as things usually do.

And today I’m writing to you from TEXAS! I was really excited to get to this state. I’ve never been, but there’s so much lore surrounding it. If I’m searching for the real America this is where I’ll find it, right? (Cue Liz Lemon: “There is no REAL America, Jack! All God’s children are terrible.”)

I’m in Houston now, but I haven’t actually done anything Texas-y yet. I want to check out downtown, and I want to hit one of the city’s MANY kosher restaurants, but so far it’s been too hot to venture outside of my hotel, and I wanted to get all this down.

But I think I’m FINALLY done with this post, so yallah!