Christmas, Part 2: Tennessee

It’s a day-long drive from Wisconsin to Chattanooga.

I tetrised a pile of bags into the minivan on the Monday morning before Christmas, thinking all the while that we’d spent most of June traipsing around multiple counties in Europe with nothing but a carry-on and a personal bag each and yet here we were filling up an entire minivan for six days in another US state, one that is fully equipped with retail establishments designed to cater to our every need should we decide not to pack something. It is a mystery.

We hit the road fairly early, and it was a pretty easy drive – straight south through Illinois, a skip through the skinny end of Kentucky, and then diagonally across Tennessee until you dip into Georgia and back out. We stopped at a Freddies somewhere because they have really good fries and that’s what you need on the road in America, and we got to the AirB&B around 10pm.

The place was huge. I mean staggeringly, disproportionately, huge. It was clean and comfortable, it did a really nice job of providing space for everyone to gather and hang out, and the location was exactly what we were hoping for, but each room was about 20% bigger than you’d think it would be and there were rooms behind rooms that were spacious enough to have been the main room. Kim and I ended up in the master bedroom suite which was quite literally bigger than my entire apartment in Pittsburgh. The double-wide staircase to the second floor reminded me of stairs I climbed in museums and it had a chandelier halfway up. We ended up arranging chairs to cut the living room in half and create a comfortable space where we didn’t have to use semaphores to have conversations, and that was immensely helpful.

Chris and Chris were already there when we got there, and my brother’s family wouldn’t arrive until later the next day so we had the 23rd mostly to hang out and get ready for the holiday itself.

The Chrises and I raided the nearby grocery store for supplies, a thought that seemed to have occurred to nearly everyone in Chattanooga that morning. But people were friendly – one nice woman gave us good advice in the produce section, for example – and I managed to tamp down my natural tendency to respond to people in the accents they use with me. I always have to stop myself from doing that as people often assume you’re mocking them when quite the opposite is true – I love accents, and it’s fun to try to use them. Just not then and there.

Shai and Lauren were out when Cara came by that afternoon.

Shai is from South Africa (he and Lauren met on a motorcycle tour of northern Vietnam this summer, which makes more sense than you think it does on first glance) which is seven time zones from Chattanooga, yet the world is small enough that he actually has a family member who lives there, someone he hadn’t seen in years, and they’d arranged a brief meetup. It was lovely to talk with her, and eventually Shai and Lauren made it back so they could see each other in person.

There was a Jamaican restaurant just a five-minute walk from where we were so we decided to go there for lunch and let me tell you if you are looking for great food with a friendly guy at the register look no further than R&N Irie Jamaican Cuisine. Highly recommended! Robert took good care of us, and we ate like kings for days.

That evening Chris and Chris made chili and cornbread. Elizabeth, Paula, and their families came over and Lori made it in and we had a lovely time the way we do with meals and conversations.

Eventually Keith, Josh, and Sara arrived as well, after a long day of airline complications.

Kim put the younger generation to work decorating cookies, which is always a dangerous thing to do with a critical mass of intelligent and creative people as you never quite know what you will get from that. Let’s just go with creative and leave it there.

Christmas Eve started slowly as people drifted out of their rooms and toward breakfast and general relaxation.

It was a day of preparations, mostly. We cooked. We hung out. Oliver worked in the embroidered tapestry that he has to turn in as a project when he gets back to graduate school.  Various family members arrived to hang out with us. We Christmased like nobody has Christmased before and nobody will again. Records were set, broken, and set again. We’re fun that way.

And then it was time for the Dice Game. We have de-emphasized presents in our family in many ways but it is nice to come away with a few things nonetheless, so we each bring two things, set them up in six piles, and then roll dice for them. It’s a little more complicated than that, but we have a grand time with it. You never know what you’re going to end up with, and the game itself is most of the fun.

This was followed by some quality hanging-out time. We can hang out at the Olympic level and we’re available for free consultations, individually or in groups. It’s a gift we have.

The evening ended with a round of Hitster, which is this year’s Game. Every year there is a Game that takes over your world and this year the Game is one that our Swedish friends introduced us to back in the summer. You need a Spotify account, but basically there are cards with QR codes that call up songs, and you get a starting card with a song and year. As new songs come up, each team has to put them into a timeline. This gets trickier as the timeline fills up. It’s a great game because a) it has good songs that you can listen to for as long as you like, and b) it hits that sweet spot where it’s interesting enough to engage with but not so interesting that you can’t also talk and eat. We played it pretty much every night we were there. NB: it helps to have multigenerational teams.

We are long past the era when Christmas morning started early. Chris, Chris, and I were usually the first people up and Christmas Day was no exception as people slowly drifted in and had breakfast. Eventually we got to the second round of gifts, mostly stockings and such though with a few other lovely things as well. Kim found a place that would make tea towels from photos of old recipes in my mother’s and grandfather’s handwriting and it was lovely to see people open them.

It was a low-key day of food prep for people of my generation – I spent the day making spaghetti and meatballs, for example – but the younger cousins took the van up to Lookout Mountain for an excursion because why not? It’s there and it’s got a great panoramic view of the city. Eventually we all regathered for dinner.

And then the younger cousins headed out again to find a gravel parking lot, where they set off the road flares that Josh had ended up with after the Dice Game because nothing says Christmas like road flares.

Our big plan for the day after Christmas was to go to the Tennessee Aquarium, which is one of the nicer such places in the country. For one thing it’s huge – there are two separate buildings, one devoted to river life and the other to ocean life. And for another, they wind you through on pathways so you can see it all.

We all met up outside in the little plaza by the busker who would improvise a rhyming verse if you tossed some money into his box.

And the first thing they do when you get inside is take your picture.

We walked through and it didn’t take us long to get separated into groups according to walking speed. The river section takes a lot longer to get through than the ocean section, oddly enough, and eventually I ended up in a group with Kim, Lauren, and Shai as others sped on ahead. We had a lovely time.

After the aquarium we all gathered at Lupi’s Pizza in Hixson, where we met up with Uncle Bob, Aunt Linda, and Linda’s sister Joyce for dinner. From there we went back to the AirB&B for an evening of further hanging out, packing up, and general entertainment. Lauren and Sara went out and got matching tattoos of my parents’ old address number in each other’s handwriting, which I thought was lovely, and Shai and Josh went out to Brian’s martial arts studio for a workout since they are both people who do that.

We headed out the next day, back north along I-24 to Nashville where we stopped for lunch at Hattie B’s Nashville Hot Chicken. I read a lot of travel memoirs as a genre, and one of them – I forget which one at this remove – said that you should always try to “do the thing in the place,” and this seemed appropriate that way. Plus we like Nashville hot chicken.

We wandered around a bit afterward. Nashville is an interesting place, even if you are just there for an hour or so.

Afterward we dropped Lauren and Shai off at their hotel. They stayed a night in Nashville, enjoying the sights and sounds of the city, and then rented a car and drove to New Orleans for a few days where they had a lovely time by all accounts. I picked them up at the airport on New Year’s Day.

Kim, Oliver, and I drove back to Wisconsin on our own. I have no idea why Illinois is always an alternative reality to drive through, but it is. One year when searching for gas and snacks we ended up not being able to get back on the highway and then directed to a dirt road that had a sign saying, “Go back! Your GPS is wrong!” and you always think this is just some random internet meme until you are living in it. This year it was foggy from pretty much the moment we crossed into the state from Kentucky until the moment we left it at the Wisconsin border. I’m not sure what this says about Illinois, but there you have it.

It was good to travel and see everyone. It was good to get home. It will be good to see them again.