Part One: Houston to Nashville
The Two-Week Loop: 1. Houston to Nashville › 2. Nashville to Louisville › 3. Louisville to Columbus › 4. Columbus to Erie › 5. Erie to Houston
This is the start of a five-part loop, so if you’ve landed here in the middle of the story, you’re actually at the beginning. The plan was simple: two weeks, one big lazy circle out of Houston, up through the Mid-South and the Rust Belt and back, hung on a stack of national parks and federal historic sites. Then the federal government shut down, locked every gate on that list, and turned a fortnight of careful planning into a nightly game of “so what around here is NOT run by Uncle Sam?”
Part one is the outbound sprint, the leg where you’re still fresh enough to pull over for everything. Arkansas is the warm-up: a riverfront that doubles as a sculpture park, and an old mill that has been in more movies than most working actors. Memphis is where the trip finds its personality, because a city that can hand you delicate ornamental ironwork in the morning and a ten-story glass pyramid full of camouflage and fish tanks in the afternoon is a city that isn’t taking itself too seriously. Then Nashville, which we spent a day and a half on and could have spent a week on, running from a full-scale Parthenon to donuts stacked so high they require a strategy.
Two days in, the shutdown was still an abstraction. Something we read about, not something we’d hit. That was about to change.
Trip Route Map
The Stops
Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site
Still a working high school and a National Historic Site, where in 1957 the Little Rock Nine desegregated it under federal troops. The visitor center across the street tells the story.
Vogel Schwartz Sculpture Garden – Little Rock, AR
Dozens of sculptures scattered along the Arkansas River in Little Rock's Riverfront Park, free to wander any time of day.
The Old Mill – Little Rock, Arkansas
The storybook stone mill from the opening scene of Gone with the Wind, tucked into a North Little Rock park and built new to look centuries old.
National Ornamental Metal Museum – Memphis, TN
The only US museum devoted to fine metalwork, on a bluff above the Mississippi, with a working smithy and a front gate covered in donated ornaments.
Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid – Memphis, TN
A 32-story glass pyramid on the Mississippi that once hosted Memphis basketball and is now a Bass Pro megastore: indoor cypress swamp, a hotel, and one of the country's tallest freestanding elevators up to a lookout.
The Parthenon – Nashville, TN
A full-scale replica of the Athenian Parthenon in Centennial Park, built for Tennessee's 1897 centennial and never torn down. Inside stands a 42-foot gilded statue of Athena.
Country Music Hall of Fame – Nashville, TN
Nashville's temple to country music, from Hank and Patsy to the current charts, in a building full of gold records, rhinestone Nudie suits, and Elvis's gold-plated Cadillac and piano.
Hatch Show Print – Nashville, TN
One of America's oldest working letterpress shops, printing concert posters since 1879 on the same worn wood type. Part of the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Donut Distillery – Nashville, TN
East Nashville mini-donut bar pouring whiskey glaze, donut shots, and boozy flights from a converted filling station. The bad news is that this post is for posterity, because they are now CLOSED! Apparently not enough people wanted to get drunk on donuts.
Five Daughters Bakery East Nashville – Nashville, TN
Family-run Nashville bakery famous for the croissant-style 100-layer doughnut, made over three days.
The Ones That Got a Wave, Not a Post
Around the edges we grabbed tacos at a Fuzzy’s along the way, paid our respects to the most famous ducks in the hotel business at The Peabody, and put away a plate at Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, because you do not drive through Memphis and skip the bird.
The shutdown gets its full villain arc next, in part two, Nashville to Louisville, where we find out exactly what a locked gate does to the longest cave on Earth.