Day 11 & 12 - Reach the Pyramid

DATE: Sunday MARCH 6TH

TIME: 11:45pm CST

LOCATION: Memphis TN

So I missed another blog post yesterday, so here is another 2 day recap! Yesterday we spent essentially the entire day travelling from Gatlinburg to Nashville. We had a 4:25pm reservation for the Jack Daniel’s Distillery tour so we got going with around 30min of slack time. A bit after the halfway point of the drive, I noticed that we randomly gained an hour of slack time. This made me do a double take on the GPS and sure enough, we had just crossed into CST. We quickly wrote to Deniz’s family that we were actually going to be an hour early to our meeting spot. That gave us a good chuckle. Upon arrival we got to spend some time with Deniz’s mom, brother and the family friends we would be staying with. All absolutely lovely people.

The distillery tour was pretty cool. I don’t drink much so I wasn’t sure how interesting it would be for me, but I was pleasantly surprised. I honestly had no idea how much effort and care it took to make Whisky. It was all really cool. I was especially interested in the fact that all of the Jack Daniel’s whisky in the world comes from the water springs on the property. Every single bottle. The spring lets out into this small cave underneath a huge amount of limestone. Make sure to take a look at the photos.

After the tour we headed to dinner at Deniz’s family friends house. I got to meet their dog Archie who was an absolute sweet heart. I also tried Turkish Meatballs for the first time. It was pretty difficult to follow the conversation since I was the only one at the table who didn’t speak Turkish and everybody was able to flow between Turkish and English without missing a beat, but I had a good time at dinner. After we ate, we headed to Broadway in Nashville.

I had basically no idea what to expect from Boardway, my mental image of it was entirely off. This place was packed. The road had been completely shut down by the local police and there were people everywhere. Pretty much every building on the 3 blocks was a 3 story bar with live music. We had Deniz’s brother Tolga with us so we couldn’t actually enter any of the proper bars together, but seeing as I barely drink that wasn’t much of a problem for me. I ended up spending most of the night hanging out with Tolga in a BBQ restaurant that didn’t card. We talked about game development, work ethic, etc. Good talk all around. After a few hours we headed back home and went right to sleep.

We got up again around 9:30 and had breakfast with everybody. I tried these really tasty turkish fried dough sticks. Pretty neat. It was nice to see Deniz in his element with his family. Don’t see that too often. We left around 11 and started our way towards Memphis and the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid

We arrived around 3pm in Memphis and you could see the Pyramid long before the rest of the city. The pictures really don’t do it justice. It’s still kinda surreal to think that this place exists. We both spent some time wandering around the store before going to relax in our insanely nice hotel room. This seriously may be the nicest hotel room I have stayed in. The shop was just as crazy as I had imagined. Tomorrow we are gonna go shopping for a while and check out some of the activities around the pyramid, of which there are a lot.

Thats about it. Ill make sure to give a direct update tomorrow

Signing off

-H