Well that was a rather long day and as always i find myself wide awake at 6am in the morning on our first day in the States.

9am UK time, yesterday, and we Barbara picked us up in the rather lovely BMW 7 series and it was another fantastic chauffeur driven journey down to Heathrow airport courtesy of A52 Executive Cars, the best chauffeur and airport transfer service in Derby (come on, i’ve got to get the occasional plug in for my own company lol). The journey went smoothly enough and soon we found our selves checking in at Terminal 5.

The Journey through the airport went very smoothly i’m glad to say and we soon found ourselves checking into the Aspire lounge. This is a mistake we won’t make again! If you are ever looking for a lounge at T5 then avoid this one – it was awful. Choice of food was limited to soup or a very dire buffet, only one coffee machine working, loos were a 5 minute walk away and the place was packed. Ok, it was only £40 each but i’d have much rather spent that in one of the airport restaurants. Ah well, you live and learn.

The plane took off on time and the flight was extremely good, plenty of space in premium economy ( or whatever BA call it these days) and nice and smooth with only one bit of mildly scary turbulence 😀 All in all, nothing really to report about it. We landed 15 minutes early, got off the plane speedily and found ourselves pretty much at the front of the immigration queue in Nashville airport. Obviously it was US Immigration so it still took bloody ages to get through but our luggage was waiting for us and soon we were off to pick up our hire car for the next three weeks.

So then, the hire car …. When we first booked the flights and car prices for car rental were through the roof so we ended up booking the cheapest available which happened to be a Kia Soul. I hadn’t researched it and the shape of the Soul made me think it was a small SUV type thing. Fortunately we decided to visit Kia in Derby a few weeks back and check one out … goddam awful car !!! We hurried back form the showroom and immediately phoned up BA to try and get the car changed lol. Long story short, BA changed us to a mid size SUV ( a Chevrolet traverse or similar) and because the price of car hire had come down we got £400 refunded for a bigger car … RESULT!!

So then, back to Nashville. We got told at the Avis desk we had been allocated a Dodge Durango, cool i thought, we have had on in the eStates before and it’s a big old thing with loads of room and perfect for a USA Road trip. On turning up to the Dodge parked in the rental garage we actually found we had been given a Dodge Durango R/T Hemi 😮 It’s a 5.7 litre V8 American beast – needless to say i’m rather excited about driving around the Deep South in this beast 😀

The Drive from Nashville to our first hotel, The German Town Inn was only 9 miles and went smoothly enough. We managed to avoid an argument ( YOU ARE DRIVING TO CLOSE etc etc) and we were soon unloading the car and getting settled in.

The Hotel is lovely and the concierge had soon sorted us out with a couple of beers and we were chilling in the Tennessee evening sun relaxing at long last.
From pick up in Derby to arriving at the hotel was around 16 hours so not too bad but I was ready for a cold one.

Anyway, thats the travel day sorted and it’s now 6:30am so i better go and wake Deb up, have some breakfast and head out to explore Nashville.

See you for the next one hopefully