Ridelog: Trois Nashville




This past week we had a wonderful trip down to Tennessee. Did you know that there was a Nashville in Illinois? I didn't. Last year we had a weekend trip organized to Nashville, Indiana. It was a delightful surprise of a ride, with incredibly technical roads. We decided to make a week long trip out of the whole thing and to "Trois Nashville". This was perhaps the largest group ride we have done with I think a total of 14 bikes. We had even more people (friends and family of various members) meet up with us in Nashville Tennessee.  

Nashville, Indiana

The first leg of the trip was largely the same as what we did for our long weekend right from last year. We left late on a Friday afternoon, and arrived that evening down near Columbus Indiana. We attempted to avoid the I-80 traffic and take some back roads out of Illinois, but that proved to not save us any time. We also had a minor delay as one of the members lost a piece of their luggage on I-65. We opted to pull an audible and get off the highway to try and find some dinner at that time, while waiting for them to double back. We found a great country restaurant called Roadhouse 39 in the town of Woodside Park. Good news, is our rider found their luggage!

Our first twisty riding day was on Saturday and was about 200 miles on some  single lane roads. I would highly recommend this area. From my map you'll see that there is an amazing section from roughly Freetown heading southwest down towards Loogootee. We ran into some minor GPS issues out in the country so my GPX log will be a little bit different than the original route maps. I have those linked about for reference as well. 

Day 2 on Sunday was about a half day of twisty technical riding and then the remainder of the afternoon to walk around and enjoy Nashville Indiana. It's a gorgeous little art community. 

Nashville, Tennessee

Monday was our highway day down to Tennessee. We stayed for this part of the trip in a VRBO, which was essentially two buildings next to each other. Our next riding day on Tuesday was on the Nachez Trace Parkway. We split up into two groups for this ride since it was just too many people. The groups road about 15-20 minutes apart. Getting out of the city proved to be a bit of a headache, even in the smaller groups of seven due to the traffic. 

Nachez Trace is a very pretty and open-winding road. Not technical like our first two days, but extremely pleasant. Be careful though as the speed limit is max 50 mph and one member in our group got a speeding ticket when he was bouncing between our two riding groups as a spotter. 

Wednesday was a break day for everyone to go and enjoy Tennessee. Several members, including myself enjoyed a massage. Some just shopped. That evening we did some bar hopping down on Broadway. I could not believe how many bars had bands performing in them in the downtown. There was someone performing every 15 feet. My personal favorite bar was the first one we hit up called Laylas Honky Tonk. It was small and cozy. Felt like a "towny bar". We hit 2-3 others up before a storm rolled in and some of us decided to high tale it back to our VRBO. Others stayed and were out past midnight. 

Our last day in Tennessee was another nice backroad ride. This time instead of trying to get out of the city in a group, we treated it like we do for our local rides and just designated a meetup spot outside the city and told everyone when KSU was. That worked out much better. It was a good ride overall, but we ran into GPS/cell issues again and our group's ride leader missed the lunch spot. To be honest it worked out in the end though. We missed having lunch with the other half of our group, but the locals in the area directed us to a place called the Ridge Restaurant. What a perfect place to eat. It felt like we were in someone's kitchen. 

Nashville, Illinois

Our last two days on the trip were just just heading back to Illinois. We left Nashville, Tennessee heading northwest and made our way towards Nashville, Illinois. It was a passthrough stop just to get the photo and we spend our last evening on the trip in Mt. Vernon before finally getting back home on Saturday in the Chicago area.