Music City, booked properly.
Lower Broadway honky-tonks, the Opry on a Saturday, hot chicken at noon and the long drive to the Smokies. What each one is really like, what it costs, and where to book it.
Seven bookings that carry a Nashville weekend.
A trolley that loops every landmark before lunch, a food walk through 12South, an Opry ticket for the Saturday night broadcast, and a party tractor down Broadway with a cooler on board. Start here and the rest of the trip fits around them.
Nashville Hop On Hop Off Trolley Tour
Ride Nashville’s hop-on hop-off trolley for live narration, 13 stops, and 100+ sights. Hop off, explore, and get back on fast.
From $53 per person
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The Opry still runs the show.
Nine decades of the same radio broadcast, now out at Opryland with a circle of Ryman stage floor set into the boards. Saturday nights sell hardest; the backstage walk gets you into the dressing rooms named for Minnie Pearl and Little Jimmy Dickens. Book the show and the tour together if you can.
How do you want to take Broadway?
Four blocks of neon between 5th and the river, and three completely different ways to spend them. Walk it, roll it, or fly over it first and come back down for the bars.
On foot
Bar to bar, no cover
2 hours (approx.) · from $84 · 975 reviews
Broadway stacks live bands three floors high and charges nothing at the door, which is exactly why it is confusing. A crawl walks you into Robert's Western World, Tootsie's and the rooms tourists miss, and usually feeds you a shot of moonshine on the way. Best after eight, best not driving.
See the honky-tonk crawls →
Rolling, 21+
Party tractor and pedal bar
1 hour 30 minutes (approx.) · from $44 · 2,480 reviews
The open-air tractors, party buses and pedal taverns that grind down Broadway with a speaker and a cooler. Bring your own drinks on most of them. Two hours is plenty, afternoons are cheaper, and the photos come out better before the light goes.
Compare the downtown rides →
Fifteen minutes up
Over the Cumberland
30 minutes (approx.) · from $160 · 868 reviews
Lift off south of the river and the whole grid lays out at once: the Batman Building, Nissan Stadium, the bend of the Cumberland and the pedestrian bridge. Short, loud, and the cleanest way to work out where everything sits before you walk it.
See the helicopter flights →
Every bar has a band by nine.
Nobody charges to get in, so the players work for the tip bucket and the room decides who is any good. Printer’s Alley keeps its own crowd, the Gulch pours cocktails instead of longnecks, and the honky-tonks on Lower Broad run until the small hours. A guide knows which stage is worth standing still for.
Eat your way down 12South.
Cayenne-lacquered chicken that comes with a slice of white bread and a warning, meat-and-three plates where the vegetables include macaroni, and a Goo Goo Cluster on the way out. The food walks cover more ground in three hours than a week of guessing.
Whiskey, moonshine, cold beer.
Charcoal-mellowed whiskey is a state law here, not a marketing line, and Lynchburg is a ninety-minute drive south through farmland. Closer to town there are distillery rooms in old warehouses and a brewery run in East Nashville worth the taxi.
Nashville keeps its receipts.
Belle Meade was a thoroughbred farm before it was a mansion tour, Fisk University sent the Jubilee Singers around the world to pay for its buildings, and the National Museum of African American Music sits three blocks from the honky-tonks. Half a day of this changes how the rest of the trip sounds.
Downtown, and everything around it.
Lower Broadway for the bands. Music Row for the studios that made the records. The Gulch for murals and cocktails. East Nashville when you want a neighbourhood instead of a strip.
Pick the kind of afternoon.
Twelve ways into the same city. Pick the one that sounds like your afternoon and everything behind it is priced and reviewed.
Tennessee is a long state.
Three hours west and you are on Beale Street. Two hours east and the Smokies start. Lynchburg, the Ocoee rapids and the Pigeon Forge strip all sit inside a morning’s drive of the interstate.
A first Nashville weekend, in order.
Nashville rewards a plan more than most cities, because the good stuff clusters and the parking does not. This is the order we would give a friend flying into BNA on a Thursday.
Day 1
Land and take Broadway
Drop the bags, get on a trolley loop to learn the grid, then walk Lower Broad from 5th to the river once the neon is on. Eat late, stand still for one band.
Plan day one →
Day 2
The records and the rooms
Hall of Fame in the morning, RCA Studio B on the shuttle after lunch, the Ryman pews before dinner. Then the Opry if it is running that night.
Plan day two →
Day 3
South to the rickyards
Ninety minutes down to Lynchburg for the charcoal mellowing and the cave spring, back by late afternoon. Lynchburg sits in a dry county, so the tasting happens on site or not at all.
Plan day three →
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