A Love Letter to Nashville: Our Top Ten Favorites

Music City,

My goodness did you host us well. We spent eleven weeks doing our best to live like locals in your midst. This is our love letter to you. It is our highly padded top ten list of family-friendly Nashville favorites. We were smitten from the very beginning of our Tennessee adventure. It was a summer to remember. Here’s to you.

Your people. You are a city filled with the most generous people. Back at home now, it’s the people we got to know who come to mind first. We made some lifelong friends, encountered all kinds of interesting folks ready with stories, directions, and local tips, and also were treated kindly by all kinds of waiters, ticket booth helpers, and museum docents. You are a noticeably friendly bunch and we are ever so grateful for how you shared your hearts, homes, hurts, places, and pets.
That artsy feel of yours. From the fun murals worth hunting for, funky eateries, Frist Art Museum, writers and musicians who call you home, live music on so many of your corners, to summer-making surprise pop up concerts, good gracious were we inspired. Having our senses surrounded by all that creativity added some juice to our own.
Your historic sites. Diving into the past by strolling through the grounds of Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage and Bell Meade Plantation were some of our very favorite memories.
Your natural spaces. Thank you for all the flowers, horse farms, trees, and rolling hills. I’ve gotta have green and you’ve got an abundance. Our hike around Radnor Lake was a favorite. Throw in Cheekwood Gardens and the Natchez Trace and I’m perfectly smitten.
Your easy-breezy outings. The Tennessee State Museum,Farmers Market,and Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park are the perfect combo for a Sunday long afternoon outing. History, veggies, plants, and sunshine? Why yes, of course.
Your food. You’ve done it. It’s foodie heaven. We barely scratched the surface of our culinary bucket list. Our family-friendly favorites were The Pharmacy, Nectar Urban, Edley’s BBQ, Bartaco, Mas Tacos (cash only), Desanos Pizza, Burger Up, Puckett’s (in Lieper’s Fork), Five Daughters Bakery, Biscuit Love, Milk and Honey , Hattie B’s followed by a chocolate covered banana next door at Bobbie’s Dairy Dip , Five Points Pizza and the extra yummy popsicles at Paletas Tacumbo in Franklin.
Your funky fun neighborhoods. We caught on quickly to the Nashville lingo and loved exploring what made each unique. 12 South, the Gulch and Germantown. You and all your restaurants are something else.
Family-friendly fun. That dragon at Fannie Mae Dees Park
captivated us for hours and the Adventure Science Center
filled up our brains and kept us fascinated.
The (backroads only, please) drive from Nashville to Franklin to Leipers Fork. It was a free and simple highlight. Every drive was dreamy and could have been billed as therapy. It’s all horse farms and blue skies (with celebrity homes hidden in the hills).
That community feel. I don’t know what it is and how it got there, but we loved that true small town feel. We enjoyed just driving through all the tree-lined neighborhoods, taking walks around the Parthenon, strolling down Franklin’s Main Street, standing on Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge watching concerts from afar, sipping tea at the Frothy Monkey and perusing books at the local treasure, Parnassus Books.

Fully Obvious Honorable Mention: Your musical downtown. Broadway and all the other musical streets are so fun. Where else can you walk down a street hearing pop, folk, country, rock and bluegrass tunes bleeding out and mingling on the street from honky-tonk after honk tonk? Where else can you saunter around in your red cowboy boots and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat with all the bravado you can muster?