With days that were numbered and samples for six cents.

Leave it to myself (and my friends) to take a road trip based, at least in some part, off of twee pop songs. Drove down from Chicago through Lexington and onto Dollywood, past the hundred yard stretch of Tennessee which contains a fireworks warehouse, an Adult Superstore, and a gigantic cross, past Pigeon Forge and its myriad lit-up Christmas display (animatronic flying pigeons, anyone?). But the roads in Tennessee through the Smoky Mountains are breathtaking, and we got to Dollywood before sunset. To be fair, I think we had all wanted to go to Dollywood before we were aware of the Tullycraft song by the same name. And The Tullycraft song has very little to do with Dollywood itself. Dollywood was all Christmas lights and charmed excess, cross-eyed reindeer and badly designed amusement park rides. Everything there was pretty fantastic. Or just pretty, along those lines.
We stayed the night in Gatlinburg (no songs written about it, thankfully), and pressed on to Nashville. It was raining and gray, we were tired and groggy on a diet of southern-fried everything. So we went to the Nashville Parthenon, a full-scale replica of the Athens’ original—but in concrete. It brought new meaning to the sort of lame and desperate (yet endearing) Casiotone for the Painfully Alone song “Nashville Parthenon”, or at least I think we’d like to believe it did. I’m not quite sure.
For the most part, our little jaunt was a success. Never have I seen so many Best Westerns in one town, that’s for certain.