Switching Gears + Nashville

In my last post I finished the Groovy quilt top but I'm switching to another quilt now.

Now it's time to start some quilting and I'm starting with the puppy quilt. Remember this one? It's been aging for a couple of months and seems to be ready for quilting. I dyed a spiral back for this one so the top needs to be centered on the back. This tutorial shows how I do this.

It's basted and ready to go. It's getting a simple Square Spiral pantograph. I expect this quilt be become a blanket and get lots of use so custom quilting isn't necessary.

In other news, we sort of skipped Christmas this year. With our friends here from England we all decided that it might be fun to take a Christmas trip so we headed off to Nashville. I've never been and it was one of the places on my "list". Well, it's not off the list because we had a great time. What a wonderful city! We are all already looking forward to going back. We were only there for 3 full days (with 2 days off travel time) but we packed in a lot.

On Sunday Chris and Laura headed to brunch and then Laura went to the Symphony for Handel's Messiah. Ian and I went straight to Nissan Stadium to watch the Saints and Titans. I've been to a couple of NFL games but both times I was in a box with a group and it was impossible to really watch the game. This time we sat in the stands and had a great time. They gave away Titans scarves to the fans and the next day every homeless person in Nashville was decked out in them.

​Our hotel was in the city so we could walk everywhere. After the game we met up with Chris (and all the celebrating Saints fans) to watch the Eagles game in a bar on Broadway.

The evening was spent mostly at The Stage on Broadway. The quality of music on this street is amazing.

We started Monday with a walkabout of the city. We couldn't go through the main park because the park was closed preparing for the Keith Urban New Year's Eve concert. I can't even comprehend the security work required to prepare for these type of events. But we did walk around this plaza with a scale map of the state and lots of information about the geography and history of Tennessee. It was very interesting. 

The rest of the day was spent on Broadway. Since it was the day before Christmas Eve we were almost alone in every bar we attended which meat that we had virtually private bands playing whatever we requested!

Most of the city is shut down on Christmas Eve. Ironically it's open Christmas Day! I didn't expect that when we planned the trip but it worked out great because we headed out to Radner Lake State Park for a 4 mile hike. This park clearly gets a TON of traffic but it's really well maintained and we saw lots of wildlife (6 point buck, flock of turkeys, ring-necked ducks) including this Red-Tailed Hawk. The wildlife is very accustomed to humans because we've never gotten this close to a hawk even in our own yard. I expect it was hoping one of the hikers would flush a mouse or something.

We ended the day with dinner at The Diner, a cool 5 or 6-story restaurant that's open every day of the year.

If you are ever contemplating a visit to Nashville I highly recommend Bode apartment-style hotel. Because of my allergies I have to stay somewhere with a kitchen so we can prepare my food. Bode was clean, reasonably well equipped and perfectly located just a few blocks from Broadway, Nissan Stadium and the Country Music hall of Fame.

I don't like many cities but I think I could live in this one.