Nashville and TV Trouble

We booked a last minute trip to a new to us campground in Nashville once we confirmed the weather was forecasted to be nice for Presidents’ Day Weekend. Due to a work commitment, we delayed leaving until Saturday morning. In hindsight, we are thankful we were able to travel during daylight as we were about to experience our first breakdown with the camper in tow.

We discovered the Grand Ole Opry RV Resort, north of Nashville, in our searching for campgrounds in Nashville that are open year round, and thought it would be nice to try.  We will share nothing but glowing comments about this campground until the end of time.

As we pulled into the campground, after a three-plus hour drive, the 4Runner died just feet off the highway. We started the engine and it again died as soon as we tried to accelerate. We walked up to the camp store and met two young men, Kurt and Curtis, and told them our story. These guys jumped into action. They checked over the car to make sure it wasn’t something simple. No luck. Next they pulled their own truck over, a beastly F-350 lifted diesel, and pulled us - the 4Runner and the Mantis - to our campsite. They proceeded to get us into our campsite, settled, leveled, and with both our camper and tow vehicle safely parked.

Kurt and Curtis had more help to offer. They drove me up to the camp store where we called around for a mechanic that they would trust, to help us out. They struck out, but had another idea. Dave has a shop up the road and does good work. His son does church service at the campground on Sunday. I could check with Dave before the service and see what he thinks.

Dave told me Sunday morning to call his guy to get the 4Runner towed first thing Monday morning and said he’d take a look that morning. True to his word, he did. Unfortunately, we had a bad fuel pump and it would take a day or two to get it shipped to Dave. Curtis checked in with us again to make sure we were good. He even offered to drive our 4Runner and Mantis back to Illinois for us later in the week, as he was going that way anyway.

We didn’t take him up on his offer, but instead rented a car to get home and come back the following weekend. We were absolutely blown away by how great they took care of us, how lucky we were at the campground when we broke down, off the highway, and how kind and helpful everyone was that we met in Goodlettsville, TN!

The tow vehicle woes were a disruption to our weekend, but we still had a great time. The camp store serves breakfast and dinner daily, hosts live music nightly, sells single adult beverages, and has a good camp store. We went up for music both Saturday and Sunday nights, had breakfast two mornings, and dinner one night. The food was good and the music was great!

We also visited the new Tennessee State Museum next to the Nashville Farmers Market. We joined a guided tour of the museum and it gave us a nice cross-section of things to see. The guide shared her favorite item in each exhibit so we got a great overview. The farmers market has a number of food vendors, we were able to share small plates from a number of them to try a number of new places. We then walked though Bicentennial Park and Germantown to take full advantage of the warm sunshine. We wrapped up the afternoon with dinner at The Wild Cow.

Stressful weekend, but it worked out fine thanks to the great people that helped us out. Thanks!