Nashville: Three Days of Music City, Belle Meade & Franklin

Three days cover the full range of Nashville's cultural geography — from the walkable downtown music corridor (Ryman, Country Music Hall of Fame, Lower Broadway) through the estate houses and horticultural gardens of the western neighborhoods (Belle Meade, Cheekwood) to the 19th-century county seat of Franklin, 20 miles south, where two of the most historically significant sites of the Civil War's western theater survive as working museums. The city's food culture threads through all three days: Prince's Hot Chicken Shack in East Nashville, which invented Nashville hot chicken in 1945; Loveless Cafe on Highway 100, which has served biscuits and country ham from the same roadside building since 1951; and Rolf & Daughters in Germantown, which has redefined what a serious restaurant in a small American city looks like. Nashville is an unusually coherent city for three days — the neighborhoods are distinct, the cultural institutions are excellent, and the driving between stops almost never exceeds 20 minutes.