I got the Amtrak up to Memphis, where I was staying one night before hopping on the bus to Nashville. Sadly this didn't give me any spare time to see the home of Elvis - what I did see was a bit rough to be honest so maybe it's not a bad thing I didn't spend any time there. It was back on the greyhound to get to Nashville, or Nashborough as it was originally monikered before the council decided to go for the French version. Whilst waiting at the station I'm pretty sure there were two Amish guys there, replete with straw hats, button down coats and massive beards, I suppose they were on the missions that they go on in their teen years. If not then they just had pretty awesome beards and a taste in sombre button down shirts and straw hats. There was also a crazy man sat talking to himself - Memphis was definitely the scariest station I've been to, despite it being a new build and light and airy. Up to this point it was the craziest bus I had to take - to start with it was packed, I was half expecting them to tell people to sit on laps, but instead they left about 5 people behind to wait for a later bus, gutted. I ended up sitting next to a man trying to change the arms on his glasses so ended up helping him out with that as his fingers were too big and there was a mental old guy behind who kept cackling about wanting to get off the bus and smoke some weed. He was a true redneck! As well as that it was delayed so I ended up in Nashville about 3 hours later than intended, not a good first impression for my first attempt couchsurfing!

As I said, Nashville was my first experience of couchsurfing, inspired by Mario from Houston. I had organized to stay with a guy called Steve, who, once I finally arrived, had an amazing array of hats, owned about a thousand musical instruments (including a drum kit he couldn't play) and some pretty sweet quilts made by his mum who apparently was big on crafts, oh and also lived just off smiley street which was nice. He was a really pleasant guy, played in a church band on a Sunday and worked in IT, and we decided to go into East Nashville to a bar called 5 spot where there was a gig with some local bands on (guttingly Jared Followill's new band had an album launch in East Nashville a week after I left, FML). There was some good music, including a band called Echo Group I need to look out for, but it was truly hipster central. I mean achingly hipster, I have never seen so many beards, rolled up chinos, checked shirts and chunky glasses in one place - I'm surprised it didn't combust with the amount of self importance that was in there…

Sunday arrived and, after buying some pop tarts (who knew they still made those?!), I made my way into the city to see what Nashville was about. The first thing that strikes you as you go toward the city is the massive building that looks like a silhouette of Batman's bat helmet; or as Steve called it 'the eye of Suaron', which works too. It makes it a kind of landmark for the cityscape and made me laugh every time I saw it, as it is older than the films that it now has relevance to. As it happens Nashvegas is pretty much just about country music and honky tonk bars. Not that this is a bad thing! I spent the afternoon looking around gift shops, checking out the music hall of fame - like the Hollywood hall of fame but for local and country music - KOL were the most recent recipients in September - and chilling out to some live music in the honkytonk bars that line Broadway, the main strip of the city. There are some great musicians, but it's frustrating because down there it is all cover music and nothing original - so you hear a lot of the same kind of stuff repeated from place to place. Plus I'm still not totally comfortable going to bars alone, I think you just look a bit weird, and I found myself either playing games on my phone or reading maps and tourist info booklets to pass time. Funnily enough Nashville was the most 'country' place I went to - there were plenty of cowboys walking around (whether they own a horse or not is up for debate) - maybe the Midwest is the true home of the cowboy.

In the evening when I returned to Steve's flat, there was another couchsurfer who had arrived, apparently the couple he had been staying with before had been arguing a lot so he thought it better to leave them to it - the perils of couchsurfing! We spent the evening playing a game which is apparently a staple of American school life - the Oregon Trail, where we proceeded to get killed by cholera, I do wonder about the American school system.

As an epicenter of country music I decided to go native and visit the country music hall of fame and the RCA studio B. Now I don't know much about country beyond Johnny Cash and Taylor Swift, who isn't really country anyway, but I found the museum really interesting, even if I do find the music all starts to be a bit depressing after a while, at least until you get to the slightly newer stuff that was the 'Nashville Sound'. The museum had Elvis Presley's solid gold Cadillac - a bit of a misnomer as it is the handles and decorative elements that are solid gold, but it was an impressive vehicle, and apparently the top half of the museum had to be built around it as it was too big to fit up any of the staircases or windows that were being built. Even after death he was being a diva haha. Also there was a load of Taylor Swift's tour clothing and sets which was interesting to look at - that girl is so tall and skinny it's ridiculous.

If you've not heard of the RCA studio B then I'm not surprised, unless you're a big fan of Elvis or some of the old school country and rock and roll stars like Dolly Parton, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers, all of whom recorded there in the height of the 50s and 60s. Dolly Parton recorded the original 'I will always love you' there, and she still owns the songwriting and copyright credits for that song and it makes somewhere in the region of $10,000 a day from that - I definitely need to write a hit song! Elvis recorded hundreds of songs there, and it was interesting to find out that he used to record songs with different coloured lights to set the right mood. Mental. He used red and green for his Christmas songs, blue for gospel, red for upbeat rock and roll stuff, and when he recorded 'Lonesome tonight' he did it in the dark because he wasn't happy with any of the lighting, true perfectionist. I have to say I've a lot more respect for the man now after learning more about him.

My last stop for the day was the Ryman Theatre, home to the Grand 'Ole Opry for 30 years (give or take, it's now at a purpose built place out of town) and the Johnny Cash show for the entirety of its run. There is a lot of history there - it is one of the best theatres in the world for music shows, the acoustics are pretty special and it has hosted near enough everyone from Johnny Cash and Elvis (his one show there for the Grand 'Ole Opry was booed off) to Coldplay, KOL and Kelly Clarkson. There is a lot of music history there and it kind of gave me the shivers, strange for a place that still holds concerts when bands tour through.

Taylor Swift, amongst others, was first discovered at the Bluebird Café, a hotspot for locals that hosts a lot of singer-songwriter open mics and shows acoustic bands on a daily basis, so I decided to go along on one of these famous nights, as they were free entry and by all accounts could turn up some gems. Well they weren't wrong and I hope to see some of the musicians I saw on the world stage sometime soon. That's not to say they didn't vary wildly from the excellent - a 12 year old girl with some real talent, two ginger moustachioed brothers playing as separate artists but with very distinct and gorgeous sounds, and a real country female singer complete with cowboy boots and Southern twang - to the comedic - a black guy on the piano with a clever ditty about posers - and the frankly horrific - a girl with the voice of a toad and little musical ability and a man who wrote a good song but couldn't sing it at all. That is the charm of an open mic night in a place like Nashville I suppose - it's the Hollywood of the music industry. Oh and if you've seen the new tv show 'Nashville', one of the lead characters works there.

I had one day remaining in Nashville and had told myself I wanted to go visit a real plantation house, and Belle Meade fit the bill so it was on (yet another) bus to the outskirts of town. Plantation houses, at the height of their existence, were basically American manor houses, although without the historical family legacies that the English ones tend to have. They would generally grow cotton, or tobacco, or some other crop, and have a lot of slaves - Belle Meade was no exception although its money was made from racehorses more than crops. It was an impressive place, over 10,000 square feet, as well as the massive house there was a dairy, family mausoleum, smokehouse for hams etc, carriage house, stables and obviously slave cabins. Nashville sided with the Southern states in the civil war and was pretty much immediately taken over by Union soldiers - thus Belle Meade avoided the fate of many Southern plantation homes - looting and burning.

The family who owned Belle Meade, the Jackson/Hardings, didn't have a particularly good time of it in the end, basically they all died, after living it large with Presidential visits and generally raucous parties (or so I imagine), various illnesses begot most of them and then betting was banned so the racehorses they bred were worthless and they lost all their money. Only two family members survived after the patriarch died, and one of them co-founded the CIA so I suppose they have had an enduring legacy.

This was my last day in Nashville and I finished it with a visit to the Nashville Parthenon where I had my best celebrity spot of the trip - Seth Green of Buffy, Family Guy and Austin Powers fame. For the record he is tiny, shorter than me anyway and that counts as tiny! The evening was nice - there was a couchsurfing evening with other hosts so I went and had some good conversations with the people there. A lot of them had been travelling before which is why they now lend their sofas to others so there were some interesting stories.

I had literally the worst journey to a greyhound ever, it was so bad that I almost missed it, and I blame it totally on the useless public bus driver I had who didn't tell me where to get off despite promising me he would. Thus I ended up on a bus out to the back end of beyond for an hour and a quarter, leaving half an hour once I returned back to the city centre to attempt to get to the greyhound station. To say I was stressed at this point was an understatement. I was marching through the city centre in the vain hope I would get there in time and two cabs came round the corner. I hailed them both and the second one stopped. It must have been fate that sent the same taxi driver who picked me up from the station when I arrived! I leapt in the back yelling ' to the greyhound station as fast as you can please' and he turned round, squinted at me and said 'I know you'. It was a random experience in the midst of an extremely stressful hour! I made it with ten minutes to spare, stressed to the max!!

Becca