We had 48 hours in Nashville, give or take. We flew in on a Friday for Paul’s birthday, flew home early Monday, and tried to fit an entire city in between. Two rounds of hot chicken, two nights on Broadway, a museum day, and a full-size Parthenon we still can’t quite explain.
This is the actual running order — where we went, roughly when, and what we’d move if we did it again. If you’ve only got two days, Friday and Saturday will do it. Sunday is the one everyone skips and it turned out to be our favourite.
Quick facts
| Trip length | Fri lunchtime → Mon early flight (call it a long weekend) |
| Flew from | Orlando (MCO) on Spirit |
| Stayed | Holiday Inn & Suites Nashville Downtown — 415 4th Ave S |
| Got around | Rideshare, scooters, and our feet |
| Best month | We went in March and it was ideal |
| One thing to book ahead | Husk. We booked 2½ months out |
Day 1: Friday — arrival, hot chicken and Broadway
4:30 am: Leave the house. Orlando is ninety minutes from us, so an early flight means a brutal alarm. Worth it — you land with the whole afternoon still ahead of you, and that’s the difference between a two-night trip and a real one.
7:00 am: Club MCO. We’re still new to the lounge game. This one isn’t the Centurion in Atlanta and it isn’t the Delta Sky Club in Tampa, but it’s free with the card, nobody bothers you and everyone in there was lovely. A decent way to make a 4:30 start feel like the start of a holiday rather than a punishment.
9:50 am: Fly. We flew Spirit. Rochelle had never flown Spirit and had strong opinions about it before we boarded. It got us there on time. That’s the whole review.
11:30 am: Land, Uber to the hotel, drop the bags. You can’t check in yet and you don’t want to wait around. Leave the luggage at the desk and go eat.
12:00 pm: Hattie B’s Hot Chicken (5069 Broadway Pl, Nashville, TN 37203). The first thing you do in Nashville is eat hot chicken and this is where most people start. Neither of us had ever had hot chicken before, and there’s no dignified way through it — you go in with your fingers.
- Order the standard recipe. That’s what we did at both places and we wouldn’t change it — the top heat tiers are a different sport, and you’ve got a second hot chicken stop on Saturday.
- Get the peach cobbler.
- Expect a queue. It moves.
1:30 pm: 5th & Broadway and the walk down. Nothing to book, nothing to pay. You come out of the plaza onto Broadway and the whole street is already going at one in the afternoon — neon on in daylight, pedal taverns rolling past, music coming out of every open door.
- There is no cover charge on Broadway. Not at one bar, not at any of them. That changes how you plan a night out: don’t pick a bar, pick a direction and walk.
- Rooftop bars are worth the climb for the view back down the street.
- There are over a hundred murals around the city if you want a photo stop between bars.
4:00 pm: Check in and clean up.
7:45 pm: Dinner at Husk (37 Rutledge St, Nashville, TN 37210). Our birthday dinner and the one thing we reserved in advance — two and a half months in advance, which tells you what you need to know about a Friday night here. It’s a restored 1880s Victorian house up on Rutledge Hill, a few minutes away from the noise, and the change of pace is the whole point.
- Ask for Dom if he’s working. Four years there, knows the menu backwards, will steer you well.
- The buttermilk biscuit comes with a syrup butter that everyone assumes is honey butter. It isn’t. We’re still arguing about what it actually was.
- You don’t need to dress up. People were in everything.
- It’s pricey. It’s worth it. Both things are true.
9:30 pm: Honky tonks. Back down to Broadway properly. The bands rotate every couple of hours, so a bar that’s wrong at nine can be exactly right at eleven — which is a good reason not to commit to anywhere early.
Day 2: Saturday — coffee, museums and music
8:00 am: Walk to Barista Parlor, Germantown (1230 4th Ave N). We walked instead of taking a car, and the honest reason is that we’d already spent about $100 on Ubers. You see a lot more of the architecture on foot. Since our visit, Barista Parlor has closed its Germantown, Hillsboro Village and Sylvan Supply shops (January 2026) — the nearest one still open is in The Gulch at 300 12th Ave S, inside the W hotel.
9:00 am: Scooters down to the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge (off 1st Ave N, spanning the Cumberland). Grab a scooter — Nashville is flat enough that it works, and it’s ten minutes of being far too pleased with yourself.
- Opened in 1909 as the Sparkman Street Bridge, carried traffic until 1998, refurbished rather than demolished, renamed in 2014 for the journalist and civil rights advocate.
- Roughly 3,150 feet across, one of the longest pedestrian bridges in the world.
- Go early. It’s empty and the light over the Cumberland is much better.
10:00 am: Johnny Cash Museum (119 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN 37201). Give it an hour to ninety minutes. It’s small, dense and put together with real care. If you only want one music museum and the big one feels like a commitment, make it this one.
11:30 am: Goo Goo Chocolate Company (116 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN 37201). Directly across the street from the Cash museum — 119 and 116 — so it isn’t really a decision. Made in Nashville since 1912 and generally credited as America’s first combination candy bar — nougat, caramel and peanuts rather than plain chocolate. You can build your own cluster in the shop.
12:00 pm: Prince’s Hot Chicken, Assembly Food Hall (5055 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203). Round two, and the one with the history — this is where Nashville hot chicken comes from, going back to 1945.
- Completely different from Hattie B’s. The heat doesn’t hit on the first bite, it arrives afterwards and then settles in.
- Worth doing both in one weekend if you space them a day apart.
- The original Ewing Drive shack, where Nashville hot chicken started, has closed for good. The Assembly Food Hall counter is the easiest one to reach from downtown.
1:30 pm: Country Music Hall of Fame (222 Rep. John Lewis Way S, Nashville, TN 37203). Allow two hours. Rhinestone suits, handwritten lyrics, the whole story of how a city turned into an industry. You don’t have to be a country fan for it to land.
- Check what’s on before you go. There was a Luke Combs exhibit running when we visited in March, and the rotating exhibits are how you end up staying an extra hour.
4:00 pm: Nashville Farmers’ Market (900 Rosa L. Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208). And a warning we learned the hard way. Rochelle hadn’t drunk enough water all day and it caught up with her here — we stopped filming, went back to the hotel and lost the rest of the afternoon.
- Carry water. Nashville is a walking city, you’ll be out in it for hours, and the drinks add up faster than you think.
- Ice cream helps. That’s a medical opinion.
5:30 pm: Back to the hotel to regroup.
7:30 pm: Pinewood Social (33 Peabody St, Nashville, TN 37210). Dinner, cocktails and a vintage bowling alley in the same building, which shouldn’t work and completely does.
- The cocktails are the reason to come.
- One of our buns turned up cold in the middle of an otherwise hot sandwich. Small thing, but we said we’d be honest.
- There’s a display about Ray Charles playing chess on a Radio Shack talking chess computer, against Ronnie Milsap and Willie Nelson. Best trivia of the trip.
9:30 pm: Broadway again. We ended up in the Garth Brooks bar singing “Friends in Low Places” with a room full of strangers and stayed out far too late, because every time we walked past a doorway one of us wanted to go in. Two nights on Broadway sounds like too many. It isn’t.
Day 3: Sunday — Opryland, tacos and a Parthenon
8:00 am: Coffee at Crema (15 Hermitage Ave, Nashville, TN 37210). Woody, sort of industrial, lovely latte art, and very good scones. A slow start was non-negotiable after Saturday night.
9:30 am: Gaylord Opryland Resort (2800 Opryland Dr, Nashville, TN 37214). You do not need to be staying there to walk in, and you should.
- Nine acres of gardens, rivers and waterfalls under glass, with restaurants and a boat ride inside the building.
- Free to walk around.
- It’s about 20 minutes out of downtown each way, and it’s bigger than it looks. Give it longer than you think — this ate more of our morning than we planned.
12:00 pm: Mas Tacos Por Favor (732 McFerrin Ave, Nashville, TN 37206). Off the beaten path and worth the trip out. Guy Fieri got here first.
- The fish taco is the standout.
- The palomas are the best either of us has ever had. Not a throwaway line — we’ve been chasing them since.
- Chill, laid-back room, no fuss.
2:00 pm: Centennial Park and the Parthenon (2500 West End Ave, Nashville, TN 37203). A full-scale replica of the Parthenon, in a public park, in Tennessee. Nobody believes it until they see it.
- Built for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition, rebuilt permanently in concrete in the 1920s, reopened as a city museum in 1931.
- Inside is a 42-foot statue of Athena by Nashville sculptor Alan LeQuire, unveiled in 1990 and gilded in 2002.
- It’s the only exact-size replica of the Athens original anywhere in the world.
- Walking the park and seeing the building from outside is free; the museum inside is ticketed. Give the inside a proper hour — we rushed it and regret it.
4:00 pm: Five Daughters Bakery (several Nashville shops — The Gulch, 602 12th Ave S, is the closest to Centennial Park). Their hundred-layer donuts. Get two. Don’t share one and pretend that was the plan.
5:30 pm: Hotel, rest, clean up.
8:00 pm: Dinner at City House (1222 4th Ave N, Nashville, TN 37208). Tucked away in Germantown — Southern ingredients pointed at Italian cooking. Wood-fired pizzas, house-cured meats, very good bruschetta, light and sharp drinks. A good last night.
Monday, early: fly home.
What we’d change
- Drink water. It cost us half of Saturday.
- Give the Parthenon a full hour inside, not the twenty minutes we gave it.
- Book the Ryman tour. It was on our list all weekend and we never made it.
- Walk more, ride less. Not for the exercise — for the $100.
- Start Opryland earlier. It’s further and bigger than it looks on the map.
Good to know
Do you need a car?
No, and you don’t want one. Rideshare, scooters and walking cover everything, and downtown parking will punish you.
Is 48 hours actually enough?
For downtown, yes — Friday afternoon through Sunday morning gets you Broadway, both hot chicken places and the museums with time to sit down. What you lose is everything outside the core: Opryland, Mas Tacos, the Parthenon. If you can add the day, add it.
Is Broadway a tourist trap?
Yes, and go anyway. No cover charge, live bands from early afternoon, and the standard is remarkably high because there are more good musicians in that city than there are stages to put them on.
When should you go?
March worked well for us — cool enough to walk all day, ahead of the summer heat and the peak bachelorette-party season.
What’s the one thing not to skip?
Everyone expects us to say hot chicken. It’s the Parthenon.
If you use this itinerary, tag us — we’d love to see how your weekend went, and what you found that we missed. And if you’d rather watch the weekend than read it, the full vlog is on our channel, mess-ups included.
Life’s an adventure. Make it a bleep’n good one.
More from this trip
- Hattie B’s vs Prince’s: which Nashville hot chicken is actually worth it
- Free things to do in Nashville (coming soon)
- A Broadway honky-tonk guide: which bars are worth your night (coming soon)
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