A commercial for Nashville, Tennessee was playing on repeat during a recent Bowl Game in December and I didn’t even recognize the city on display even though I had previously visited it twice. I was surprised not to see Nashville as I remembered it, but I was there with my young kids tethered to me like little planets in constant gravitational pull to my side, to my chest, to my heart and to my brain. I may not have experienced the real Nashville in all its revelry and joy because traveling with children can put a filter on a city.
On our first visit to Nashville, Henry was a baby, fresh in the world and strapped to my body as if he were still in the womb. When we decided to have him, we knew we were disrupting our older kids’ lives, so we made a pact to keep our lives going, doing all the things we loved including traveling. So, we packed up the car when he was only 3 months old, put a Davy Crockett cap on his little head and some toys around his rear-facing car seat, and headed west!
Nashville was the first big city we intended to see on our way to California. Tennessee, the first state we hit outside of Virginia, ended up being the beginning and the end of our first family road trip as a party of five.
A commercial of our time in Nashville would show me in a hotel room sitting in the desk chair rolled between the two beds feeding Henry, watching tv, and eating massive amounts of room service. The camera might cut to Chris strolling downtown with two middle schoolers looking in bars with music swirling all around plentiful as air or sunshine. A highlight might also be the Parthenon in Centennial Park, a full scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens. Here you might see the kids running around free in the park and me sauntering around in sunshine with a sleepy-eyed baby in my arms unaware of his first adventure marked on the map of his traveling life.
Back then we weren’t exactly the target audience for Nashville’s marketing campaign that highlights the bar scene and the joys of drinking and dancing. But traveling these days with my adult children, now aged 23 and 21, makes me think we might be ready for a return trip to Nashville to enjoy it in its truest form.
I still look a little stunned when I share a bottle of wine with my son or shriek in unison with my daughter at a creative cocktail menu, taste testing each other’s drinks. What an unexpected turn of events these days are when their toddler days seemed to stretch on forever. Their adolescence was never ending. But here we are toasting to the joys of having a drink with your grown children who sometimes even pick up the tab!
And deep inside I feel a small candle of worry and fear snuffed out, the one that flickered for a while throughout their college years, the one that worried they wouldn’t want to hang out with us anymore or worse, travel with us anymore. But they do!
They come back to us, no longer planets but more like shooting stars streaking through with all their shimmer and all my wishes coming true. I watch them in airports and hotels, making their way with confidence and experience.
I listen to them building our itinerary and making our dinner reservations on Open Table and I raise a glass knowing we gave them the road, the skies, and the map of the world.
Nashville, get ready! We are going to return someday soon and have a boot scootin’ boogie good time and we will celebrate family, travel, and seeing old places with new eyes.