We had been tossing around the idea of a Nashville weekend road trip for a while. So, one Friday afternoon we finally just loaded up the RV and pointed it east—or north, or whatever direction Nashville is from wherever you are. The point is, we went.
Music City perfectly illustrates how a city can be both loud and hospitable. In fact, from the moment we drove downtown, there was live music coming from every single doorway. The aroma of deep-fried and tasty food filled the air. There is an overall atmosphere that screams you are going to have a great time here. You won’t take much time to feel at home.
Nashville was such a perfect weekend getaway destination since it is a very walkable city. Once the RV was parked, most major sights were nearby. Unlike most trips, we didn’t waste half of our time driving around looking for things.
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Table of Contents
Know Before You Go on a Nashville Weekend Road Trip
A few things that would have been helpful to know before we got there:
- Parking downtown is expensive and fills up fast on weekends. Download a parking app (like SpotHero) before you leave. Garage prices near Broadway hit $30–40 on weekend nights. We found it easier to park in a garage near SoBro and walk everywhere from there. Street parking exists, but reads like a scavenger hunt.
- Drive times: Friday traffic into Nashville from I-40 or I-65 is brutal between 4 and 7 PM. Leave by 2 PM or after 8 PM.
- Most live music venues have no cover before 6 PM. Use that happy hour window if available to grab a booth, sip a local ale, and listen guilt-free. Many Nashville bars do not have traditional happy hours because the foot traffic is consistent enough that they do not need them. Prices are what they are—budget for it.
- Rideshare apps work well in Nashville and are strongly recommended for late-night Broadway adventures. Finding parking at that hour is not worth the effort..
- Reserve hot chicken spots ahead. Hattie B’s lines can wrap around the block. Order online for pickup, or accept that you’ll be smelling fried spice for an hour while waiting.
Hot Chicken Is Not Optional
Okay, real talk—food was the whole reason we mapped this trip the way we did. Everything else was negotiable. Nashville hot chicken was not. This isn’t something a restaurant dreamed up to fill a menu gap or charge an extra five dollars. It is a real tradition, like gumbo is to New Orleans. If you haven’t tasted it before leaving town, well, maybe this trip wouldn’t feel like a real success.
Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack is the original, and the line is worth every minute. Order it at whatever heat level you think you can handle, then go one level lower. We are speaking from experience. The chicken arrives on white bread with pickles, and that combination is doing more heavy lifting than it looks like it should.
We also hit Hattie B’s on Charlotte Ave. Ordered medium again because we’re brave, not foolish. Medium still made our noses run.
Pro tip: get the pimento mac and cheese as a coolant. You’ll thank us.
Hot chicken aside, Nashville’s food scene has quietly gotten quite good—better than we expected, honestly. We ended up spending most of our eating time in the Assembly Food Hall, a walkable stretch with barbecue, tacos, sushi and the kind of Southern cooking that makes you regret eating breakfast. Prince’s Hot Chicken is in there too—don’t walk past it. The line looked long and moved in fifteen minutes. Worth it.
For lunch on the go, the Nashville Farmers Market was the right call. There’s a covered food hall with a rotating mix of vendors—nothing fancy, just solid food at a pace where nobody’s rushing you out the door. After a full morning of walking, eating slowly felt like a reward. One of the best things about a Nashville weekend trip is that the eating genuinely never stops—and you will not complain about that.
Broadway, the honky-tonks, and actually finding good live music
If your Nashville road trip itinerary has any flexibility at all, leave Saturday night completely open for Broadway. Lower Broadway is exactly what it looks like: a street full of bars stacked two or three stories high, each one with a live band on every floor, playing country music from roughly noon until the city finally calls it a night. It is chaotic and fun and a little overwhelming all at once, and we say that as a compliment.
We walked Lower Broadway at 4 PM. Dead? Nope. Already rowdy. Every bar had its doors open, and we learned the real Nashville trick: listen from the sidewalk for half a song, then walk in if the banjo player isn’t crying into his mic. We found a three-piece bluegrass band at Robert’s Western World playing “Fox on the Run” like their lives depended on it. No cover. We bought two Lone Stars and tipped $5. That’s the deal.
Pro tip: Most bars on Broadway don’t charge a cover, which feels almost too good to be true—and in a way, it is. The catch is that the bars don’t actually pay the bands. The musicians are working for tips, so when the hat comes around, throw something in. They’re the whole reason you’re having a good time in there.
Honky-tonk roulette. We made a game: walk into any bar with a neon guitar, stay for one drink, move if the singer does a slow cover of “Wonderwall.” By 10 PM, we’d hit six bars, heard an accordion solo over “Sweet Caroline,” and accidentally joined a line dance we definitely invented new moves. The locals didn’t judge. They just handed us another beer.
Tennessee Shine Co. is worth poking your head into—it’s over at Opry Mills, right by the Grand Ole Opry. Easy to miss if you’re just there for the shopping, but we’re glad we found it. Tasting flights are free, the staff actually knows their moonshine history, and the flavors range from “oh that’s smooth” to “whoa that’s strong.” Peachy Peach was our favorite—dangerously drinkable. Walked out with a Mason jar and a better appreciation for what bootleggers used to haul through these hills. Solid detour if you’re already out near Opryland.
Beyond Broadway: Where Nashville Gets Quiet
This is the side of a Music City weekend visit that most people miss entirely. Not everything in Nashville is country, and if that’s your thing, the Basement East and the Bluebird Cafe are worth knowing about. The Bluebird is the one people talk about most—it hosts songwriter nights where artists play their own stuff acoustically in a room that holds maybe a hundred people. After a night on Broadway, it feels like a completely different city, in the best way.
Pro Tip: The Bluebird Cafe is a tiny venue, strictly enforces its reservation policy, and tickets disappear quickly, often a month in advance. Buy your tickets before you leave home. This is not the place to show up and hope for the best.
One thing Nashville will teach you fast—the schedule is more of a suggestion. Shows change, bands swap out, and the night almost never goes the way you sketched it out. We checked one venue website, made a loose plan, and then completely ignored it by 8 PM. Turned out better that way.
Beyond the Bars: What Else to Do
Nashville is not just a drinking city—though no one is going to stop you. A weekend in Nashville, Tennessee, packs in more history per square mile than you would ever expect. For us, morning came early. Too early. But a weekend in Nashville means you can escape the noise. We drove ten minutes to Centennial Park to see the full-scale Parthenon replica. Yes, Nashville has a Greek temple. No, we didn’t expect that either. It’s free to walk around, weirdly peaceful, and great for sweating out last night’s whiskey.
Late morning, we hit the Country Music Hall of Fame. Worth the $28 just to see Elvis’s gold-plated Cadillac. We spent two hours there, and we’re not even huge country fans. The exhibits on 90s country fashion alone–those rhinestone suits had shoulders–are a comedy goldmine.
Explore the historically crucial RCA Studio B with a guided tour. Elvis recorded here. Dolly Parton recorded here. The list goes on. The tours are guided and move at a comfortable pace.
Afternoon, we did the Ryman Auditorium self-guided tour. Standing on that stage, you feel every legend who ever played there. We tried to look profound. Instead, we made ghostly echo noises. Security did not laugh.
We almost skipped the Opryland Hotel. Figured it was just a fancy place to sleep. But we kept hearing about it from locals, so we gave it an hour. It’s a giant indoor garden under glass—waterfalls, rivers, little boats putting around, paths winding through different themed sections. We walked through Delta, Cascades, and Magnolia, just watching the flatboats go by while someone played guitar from a balcony somewhere. Cost us nothing. Cooled us down between meals. No regrets.
We also swung by the Grand Ole Opry. Even if you don’t see a show, the area’s worth the drive. But if there is a show? Get tickets. They are expensive, but so worth it. We went in curious and left converts. It’s been running since 1925—older than your grandparents—and somehow still feels alive, not dusty.
Ghost Hunting on Lower Broadway
So we did the extended ghost tour thing with US Ghost Adventures. Not gonna lie, I’m a total sucker for ghost stories, and my friend kept saying Printer’s Alley couldn’t possibly be as haunted as people claim. She was wrong lol.
Our guide looked like she rolled straight out of a Victorian funeral, all black everything, super dramatic energy. But she actually knew what she was talking about—Prohibition stuff, where people got killed back in the day, legends you’re not gonna find in any brochure. We paid a bit extra for the “extended” version and it was worth it, took us down alleys the normal tour doesn’t even bother with.
Started at the Ryman. Some say the Ryman’s stage is cursed—that performers who sing there may be trading their lives. Urban legend? Maybe. But the stories stick. Then Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge—the staff say they’ve seen weird shapes in the upstairs windows at night, after everyone’s gone. Presumably the apparition is that of former owner Tootsie Bess.
The Presbyterian church though, that one actually got to me. Union soldiers used it as a hospital when they occupied the city—pews turned into beds, they did surgery off the pulpit. People say you can still hear groaning sometimes, or randomly smell blood. And apparently people have seen a guy in a beat-up Union uniform kneeling by the altar, like he’s praying, and if you get close he just kind of vanishes. I hadn’t even gone inside yet and I already had goosebumps.
After that we headed into the alley itself, and this is where she pulled out the good stuff—murders, old bootleggers sneaking whiskey through back doors, and this piano that supposedly plays by itself around midnight. It was dark, the neon signs were buzzing above us, and honestly every story just kept getting creepier.
The best part? Somewhere near Skull’s Rainbow Room, the guide pulled out this little EMF detector that started blinking like a Christmas tree. He swore it meant a ghost was standing right next to me. But either way, we left shivering, with at least a dozen pictures taken through blurred eyes of nothing, along with a story which seems to get better each time we share it. And if you are tired of all those bachelorette parties on pedal taverns while visiting Nashville, take the extended tour. But don’t think about sleeping peacefully that night.
Road Trip Essentials for your Nashville Honky-tonk Weekend
Quick gear rundown before you go—this is the stuff that actually got us through a full weekend of Broadway bars and a late-night ghost tour, linked below.
The slip-on sneakers were an easy save after hours of bouncing between honky-tonks. My feet would’ve been done for without them. Power bank was non-negotiable too—between Ubers at 1AM and trying not to get lost in Printer’s Alley, our phones would’ve died halfway through the night otherwise. And I brought a small crossbody bag that fit everything I needed without making me look like I was heading to the airport.
Final Thoughts: Our Nashville Weekend Road Trip
We drove into Nashville thinking we’d do a tidy little Broadway bar crawl road trip and leave with a few photos. Instead, we left with a sore throat from singing along to songs we’d never heard, an RV smelling like hot chicken for three days, and the unshakable feeling that Music City doesn’t try to impress you–it just welcomes you to make a fool of yourself. And honestly? That’s way better.
Just remember: what happens on Broadway stays on Broadway, unless you post it. Then it stays forever.
Ever done a Nashville weekend road trip? What’s the weirdest place you found live music? Tell us in the comments.
