Sightseeing in Nashville: Science, History, and Doughnuts!

Nashville is such a kid-friendly city that when I could eventually be dragged away from the country music, we found plenty of other fun things to do there. We revisited the Nashville Parthenon, this time in the daylight:

We wanted to go inside and see the recreated statue of Athena, but alas, the price stymied us--twenty bucks seemed a little spendy just for statue spying, so we stayed outside:

We've been to Greece since the last time we saw this Parthenon, and both kids commented that from that perspective, the Nashville Parthenon actually doesn't look all that much like its Athens counterpart. The structure is the same, of course, and the metopes are evident, and it's not, you know, under construction, but most importantly to the children--it's the wrong color!

I guess brick, plaster, and wood can't compete with Pentelic marble.

Of course, after turning up our collective noses at spending twenty bucks on art and history, we spent just about twenty bucks on four doughnuts at Five Daughters Bakery!

The kids noted that this is possibly THE most hipster establishment that we have ever frequented, and we have a hipster bakery in our own hometown!

BUT the doughnuts were delicious, as you can see:

And there was a hipster playground for the kids to run off their sugar in:

We are constantly losing that little kid on vacations!

Our hometown hands-on science museum is a member of the ASTC Passport Program, and I like to make a point to stop into whatever other member museums that we can whenever we travel--since visits to member museums are free, it's a terrific and free way to kill some time with the kids. Even though we went to the Adventure Science Center during our trip through Nashville last year, when we went back there were several new things to do, and it turns out that the things that the kids had done last year were still fun, too:

Last year, the Adventure Science Center had a traveling exhibit on poisons that we all loooooooved, but I might have loved these two traveling exhibits on math in motion and math-inspired art even more!

Ugh, I was obsessed with this over-engineered, large-format spirograph:

And of course the kids found the toddler toys. These toy fruits were actually super cool, because they were also fraction manipulatives--you could have one-half of an apple, then attach another one-third apple to it, and see how much of an apple you have! I was wishing I'd had a set when the kiddos were wee--maybe it would have made equivalent fractions more transparent to them when they were introduced in their math curriculum...

Here you can graph your movement up and down a column of colors:



Here you can play with your shadow:

Here you can play with light:

Here you can play with perimeters:



And here you can just play!

We once again stayed until we closed the place down, and then we headed downtown for food, Broadway, and The Grand Ole Opry.

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