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Browse the latest Tennessee Firsthand stories ↓
Discover places to visit, things to do, food, hotels and stories from across Tennessee.
You can spend hundreds of dollars planning a Tennessee vacation and still get a few small things wrong. Talking through a songwriter’s performance in Nashville. Bringing your dog onto the wrong trail in the Smokies. Pulling into someone’s driveway to photograph a beautiful old barn. None of these mistakes requires bad intentions. But they can … Read more
You can have $8,000 in savings and a negative net worth. You can also have a positive net worth of $50,000 and only $1,000 in the bank. Those are hypothetical examples, but they explain the catch in a striking Tennessee statistic. A SmartAsset analysis estimates that 15.7% of Tennessee households had zero or negative net … Read more
At most Nashville restaurants, the most exciting thing that moves past your table is the dessert cart. At the Aquarium Restaurant at Opry Mills, it’s a shark. The entire dining room wraps around a 200,000-gallon saltwater tank holding more than 100 species, from stingrays and moray eels to schools of bright tropical fish. The tank … Read more
There’s a river inside this hotel. You can ride a boat on it, under a glass roof, past waterfalls and restaurants, without ever stepping outside. Gaylord Opryland Resort has 2,888 rooms and nine acres of indoor gardens. Nashville’s official tourism site describes it as the largest non-gaming hotel property in the United States. Walking through … Read more
Our 5-year-old couldn’t swim without armbands. It was my biggest worry before we booked. It turned out not to matter at all. We live in Murfreesboro, about 30 miles from Nashville, so we almost never book a hotel there. But in July 2025, my wife and I made an exception and took our two boys, … Read more
In 1928, a chemist digging for one cave inside Lookout Mountain broke into a different one by accident. He crawled through it in the dark for 17 hours. At the end, he found a waterfall pouring out of the rock. Nearly a century later, my wife and I took our two boys, then 8 and … Read more
At its steepest, this train climbs a 72.7% grade. It’s the steepest passenger railway in North America, and it’s been hauling people up the side of Lookout Mountain since 1895. I wasn’t sure how our two boys, then 8 and 5, would handle that. It turned out to be one of the easiest and most … Read more
