6. June 2025
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Six US States And Nashville (Day 4 – 2nd June 2025) – Sweet Home (?), Alabama

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

My original plan for that Monday was to stay in Nashville and potentially have a look at the Rock n Jock celebrity softball game in the evening. However, it felt so warm and humid that I decided to change my plans. Finally, this 2nd June 2025 gave me an amazing day. Here is my report from the fourth day of my Six US States and Nashville trip.

 

A Hidden Nashville Attraction

Even though I took the decision, not to head back North to Music City, I at least featured one attraction of Nashville. Rather close to the Hampton Inn Nashville/Brentwood I-65S, where I checked out in the morning, is the Tennessee Agricultural Museum. It comes a bunch of interesting historic farmer tools and stories. Furthermore there is a bunch of cabins with historical settings in the museums’s garden. The whole museum, by the way is located on a hill, which hosts multiple public research entity.

 

Historic Trains And Chocolate Bars

After that I skipped the exit to Central Music City and decided to head South earlier. The key visit was the Lynnville Railroad Museum. However, I also fell in love with the Tennessee small town, which has a beautifully and nostalgic feel.

In the museum, I read and learned about the Milky Way Farm. I just had to introduce that one into my trip. The farm house in Pulaski was once owned by Franklin C. Mars. He is indeed the person, who invented the chocolate bar. Fun fact: what US people call Milky Way is sold as Mars in Europe and most of the world. There is, however, a very different bar called Milky Way in Europe as well. A bit of confusing – but I did not care about things like that and enjoyed the lovely time in Southern Tennessee.

 

Sweet Home Alabama – With A Local Hero

Soon thereafter, I crossed the Alabama state border and thus visited my fourth US state on that trip (as always Chicago / Illinois excluded). There were also signs for a Buc-ees at the I-65 already some 30 miles before the in fact road stop. I did not have time to stop there, even though I felt very tempted after the great Day 2 experience there. Another typical tourist stop on that route would have been the Jack Daniels original distillery. However, the GPS showed that I will arrive at my next destination at 14:55. Knowing that it would be closing at 16:00, having additional delays was no option. I especially liked the Tennessee River crossing at Decatur. However, it felt like the closer I was to my destination, the worse the roads turned out to be. This included some 5 miles on gravel – with terrible podholes.

My target was the small town Danville. This is the region where Jesse Owens, the famous and legendary athletics sportsman, was before I moved later to Cincinnati. The region is still proud of the 1936 Olympian, who especially broke the hearts of the German leaders at that. Finally, he won four medals at at the Olympics in Berlin. The museum is not that catching and large, but very educative. In the park of the museum, they have a replica of the house where Jesse and his family. I especially loved the educational movie, so that left the museum building more or less right in time at 16:00.

 

My Next Stop: Muscle Shoals

After this lovely experience, I headed on to Muscle Shoals. I refueled the car and had an ice cream at a gas station before more or less heading straight along AL-153. Straight is the right word – the highway just had very few curves and thus felt rather boring. The signs of Muscle Shoals name the city – with typical US-American understatement – the Hit Recording Capital of the World. However, the there are two major studios in that 16,000 people town, which indeed recorded a lot of successful tracks. Namely, these are the FAME Studios and the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. You can visit the latte,r I just don’t have the time to squeeze it into my schedule of that trip. I also took a short detour to Muscle Shoals Airport (MSL) to have a quick glance at the facilities before flying from there the next day.

As I just had a bunch of celery and some snacks during the day, it was time for a “family restaurant”. The three piece chicken dinner with a drink was some 14 USD and thus a very nice value for money. For the next three nights of the trip, I opted for non-Hilton brand hotels. For the nights in Muscle Shoals, this is namely the Days Inn Muscle Shoals Florence, some three kilometers away. The hotel is fine. I liked its motel-style with my car parked right at the door. Time for quite some Flyctory.com work, before heading to sleep and preparing for a flight adventure on Tuesday.

 

My Song of the Day: The BossHoss feat. Arnold Schwarzenegger – I’ll Be Back

This trip is about music. Thus I felt present one song each day which somehow accompanied me every day. And I added a playlist of these songs – and some more – on my Spotify account as well:

I’ll Be Back to Nashville – which song would fit better to that day than the previous Friday’s release by the German band The BossHoss. The country-rockers feature nobody but Arnold Schwarzenegger in their song. An outstanding, cool one. I also took the straightforward option and went for Sweet Home Alabama (Lynyrd Skynrd). The other two songs I added for this post are You Can Call Me Al (Paul Simon), as I just had to hear it when I saw the ad at the road, and Redneck Yacht Club by Craig Morgan

Here is the full playlist, which will grow day by day:

 

Six US States And Nashville – Daily Episodes

Here is an overview of the daily postings. I will link them once they

There will be no Day 12 report, as this would only cover the flight back to Germany.

 

Musical History

These are all articles, in which I dealt with events and places influencing musical history:

 

2025 Museum Reviews

Here are all my Museum & Exhibition reviews I published in 2025:

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