Music USA

A trip through the Southern USA music capitals.

My Mum and I spent the school Easter holidays on a 2 week fly drive in the USA. My Mum has a ‘special’ birthday (as she calls it) this year so wanted to do a special trip. She has always wanted to tour the music capitals in southern USA. So we travelled from Nashville to Memphis and New Orleans.

We flew to Nashville. As this was a special holiday we flew business class which made my first long haul flight very comfortable. When we landed, we had thankfully just missed storm and hurricane warnings.

I am not into country music but it was interesting to see what Nashville had to offer. I didn’t really like the city itself as it was full of bars and party buses playing loud music. We did go to the music museums including the Country Music Hall of Fame, but I most liked the National Museum of African American Music. This included hip hop and rap music which is more of interest to me and had lots of interactive exhibits.

We then drove to Memphis as Mum really wanted to visit Graceland. We explored downtown and Beale Street as well as having dinner at The Peabody Hotel. I had the best steak of my life here! Then we visited Graceland. I thought the house would be bigger but there were plenty of exhibitions abut his life and career. Elvis’ cars and planes were most interesting to me and I found some of the other exhibits rather boring.

We then took the longer drive down to New Orleans. The French Quarter was really interesting to look around and there was a free jazz festival on there which added to the atmosphere. However it was very hot so we planned some indoor things to get out of the heat including the aquarium and the National WW11 Museum. my mum thinks this is one of the best designed museums she has been in. On our last day we went on a swamp tour which was great and we saw large alligators. It is a great city with plenty to do, whether you are into Jazz or not.

We then took a couple of rest days along in Alabama on the gold coast. We stayed in Mobile and also headed down to Orange Beach where we went on a dolphin watching cruise. We saw a pod of dolphins feeding before we even left the harbour which was lucky. It was good to have a couple of chill days.

We finished by heading back to Nashville. It was a great trip, though I did get a bit homesick in the middle as I have not had as long a holiday before. But it was definitely an amazing experience.