After the zoo, we took a drive down Broadway, and then went to the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. Everyone thought I was crazy for dragging them to a hotel, but the place is HUGE (9 acres of indoor gardens, 2,881 guest rooms) and it was all decorated for Christmas with over 2 million lights – amazing! In return for humoring me by going to the hotel, the family made me eat at Dave & Busters, where Norah dumped a giant Shirley Temple on herself and Ben (karma?). It’s hard to imagine that the hotel and the mall next door were under water after a flood in 2010.
I didn’t take enough photos to give any sense of how gigantic the atria are, but here are a few:
To give this “tree” some scale, the trees at the bottom right are full-sized trees.
How do they get lights on every branch?
We stopped at the Grand Ole Opry for a photo op:
