Greetings From Nashville!

It took less than ten minutes through TSA, two hours on a plane, and a timeless rock track sung by a musician moonlighting as a Lyft driver to transport a trio of New Haveners to Nashville. 

In the same amount of time, three hyperlocal reporters and homebodies were transformed into tourists, traversing beyond transportation-themed press conferences into new territory bordered by bluegrass, barbecue and surprisingly substantial bike lanes for a car-centric state. 

We found ourselves in Tennessee this past weekend in an effort to explore where highly advertised $49 flights offered by Tweed New Haven Airport could take us. The flights began this past week.

We flew via a budget airline known as Avelo, which recently contracted with Tweed to fly directly from New Haven to domestic locations D.C., Chicago, Raleigh, Florida, Hilton Head, and Nashville. The airline’s contract precedes a planned expansion of Tweed’s runways, which has generated controversy in neighboring Morris Cove and East Haven: Opponents cite the environmental and neighborhood impacts of a larger airport. Proponents of the expansion say a larger airport will boost the economy, including tourism.

Having reported on the controversy, we wanted to experience an Avelo flight out of Tweed for ourselves. And as community journalists, we were excited to look for sources of connection between our favorite small city and a megalopolis like Nashville.

We started by looking into booking tickets. 

The flights to Nashville were less expensive than those returning to Connecticut. Our Saturday afternoon plane tickets to Nashville cost $59 each, tax included; our Monday evening flights back to New Haven cost $129.

The cheap one-way ticket came with a catch: there were only a few flights scheduled out of Tweed to Tennessee, and all departed and subsequently returned at inconvenient times. So rather than leaving for a weekend, we traveled from New Haven to Nashville from Saturday afternoon through 10:30 p.m. Monday.

One tricky part was avoiding — or trying to avoid — surprise fees. Two of us chose our seats ahead of time, not realizing until it was too late that our assigned seats cost an extra $12 and $13 each. And we realized that we’d be allowed to bring only a small bag capable of fitting underneath an airplane seat if we wanted to avoid a baggage fee. Two of us managed to stuff our clothes, toiletries, and reporting equipment in small backpacks, while the other (Maya with the outfits) paid an extra $40 to store a carry-on duffel above the seat.

We arrived at Tweed around 3:30 p.m. on Saturday for a 5 o’clock flight, determined not to miss our plane at the hands of wand waving security agents.

We showed up to a virtually empty building. By 3:45 were sitting at our gate.

Of the plane’s 150 available seats, only 50 were occupied. Upon boarding a Boeing 737, we were allowed to ditch our assigned spots and sit side by side.

Under two hours later, we were wandering through a crowded international airport at least five times Tweed’s size. We called a Lyft to make it to our Airbnb — and were treated to a live performance by David Max, leader of the pandemic-born band ​“David Max of the Nashville Cats,” who crooned along with the title track of his new album, The Last Train Out, as we cruised through the Tennessee suburbs.

“My son is the real star,” Max told us, noting that his kid, Austin Max, trained at Boston’s Berkelee School of Music. 

We stayed on the second floor of a rustic house on Castlewood Drive, where our hosts, Marie and Mark, live with their dog, Peaches. Their home was hidden in a valley just behind a sprawling residential area, framed by a bubbling brook, a lush lawn and a blue porch swing hanging in the backyard. Upstairs, we found a deer head hanging on the wall, a comfortable leather couch, a startling number of rag dolls and what appeared to be a preserved alligator head.

Cartoons critiquing Nashville’s rapid development lined the bathroom walls.

The city’s recent, fast growth became apparent as we left the suburban bathrooms and wandered into Nashville’s downtown areas. Glass skyscrapers seemed to pop up on every block. High-end bars, electric scooters, and new construction filled the tourist‑y Gulch neighborhood’s streets.

In the bathroom stall of a barbecue restaurant, someone had scrawled: ​“New to Nashville — Bless your heart — don’t vote us into the state you left!”

As lifelong Nashville resident Teaundrea Brooks, 26, told us, ​“Everywhere you go, it’s nothing but condos.” (Watch a conversation with Brooks on WNHH radio’s Word On The Street segment below.)

We seemed to encounter two types of people during our trip: Nashville natives who have observed their city changing with tourist inflation and mass development, like Brooks; and hungry artists who had moved to Nashville for the music scene, like Max.

We kicked off our first night by following two of our locally based friends — as well as a crowd of night-life lovers and an astonishing number of bachelorette parties — through Lower Broadway, which showcased a strip of LED-laden bars, each blasting live country music. We hopped from Losers Bar & Grill to the three-story Honky Tonk Central to a number of venues with unmemorable names, basking in the reverberations of bands whose sounds clashed in the streets outside and created a cool collision of sounds and neon symbology.

The next morning, we stopped for breakfast at Milk & Honey, a too-trendy-for-our-taste but highly recommended southern restaurant where Nora, a retired vegetarian, and Maya rushed for hot chicken and waffles. Laura, a vegan who was still affected by the taxidermy deer head in our Airbnb, began her descent into hunger with a plate of kale.

After facing long lines of families vying for tables for Mothers’ Day brunch, we finally followed Mark’s advice and moved towards Midtown to see Centennial Park, where we discovered cars packed onto the massive green space’s grass and dozens of white tents arranged in a square around the park’s main field.

We soon learned that we were gathered not just by the city’s famous replication of the Parthenon, but at the 51st Annual Tennessee Craft Fair. We encountered local textile weavers, painters, jewelry makers, metalworkers, and the show’s Best New Idea winner, Brian Melton.

Melton was whittling a block of wood into the face of a man he’d met earlier that day. Melton is a high school English teacher at a Nashville Magnet school, but his dream is to teach art at a university. Each day, he wakes up at 5 a.m. and spends three hours sculpting wooden art before the school day begins, he said.

“Art is truly a compulsion,” Melton told us — one driven by an urge to learn and share others’ stories, he said. 

After laying in the sun for hours, it was time for another meal. Nora, who was determined to subsist entirely on meat through the weekend, drove the crew to Jack’s Bar-B-Que for brisket, mac n’ cheese, baked beans and twisted teas — after making a pit stop for Laura to pick up some plantain tacos.

Though we were racking up food-related costs, entertainment was abundant and free. At the Station Inn, one of the famous music joints where our editor visited on his honeymoon 39 years ago before he became entirely transfixed by New Haven politics, we didn’t have to pay a cent to hear ten bluegrass talents meet up for a jam. 

Our last day was celebrated with 80 degree weather and foot-aching strolls downtown to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (which we ultimately skipped in the name of financial sustainability), visits to local tattoo artists, the Nashville Public Library, and French’s Shoes & Boots which featured a basement full of bargain boots, pairs of which protected our sensitive northeastern feet from blistering further. 

And, of course, more fried chicken (and plates of vegetables, in Laura’s case) were consumed. 

Too soon, it was time to return to our New Haven home. 

We made our way back through the traffic wrapped around Tennessee International Airport, waving goodbye to the generous bike (or, really, electric scooter) lanes; the oversized trees; the smooth Southern accents; the ​“We Support Donald Trump” billboards; and the numerous ​“No Firearms Allowed” signs.

Touring Nashville revitalized our understanding of communities’ power to create and innovate. It also reminded us of the complexities facing all municipalities in the quest to define their political, cultural and economic identities while taking care of the diverse people who consider a place — whether it’s Nashville or New Haven — home. But whether or not we think the growth of Tweed is a net positive or negative in New Haven’s history, anyone who follows Avelo to New Haven will be lucky to witness a community of active and engaged individuals ready to debate even the smallest stuff.

Before we got off the plane, we paid one last turbulent goodbye: With a final, dramatic gust of wind, the plane tipped — and so did an exhausted tourist’s stomach. Laura the vegan was safe — but the WNNH FM logo on Nora’s sweatshirt was lost in a flood of gravy and no longer crispy chicken.