Why I Stopped Waiting for the Perfect Time to Travel
The perfect time never came. So I went anyway.
A funny thing happens when you start paying attention to the trips people say they want to take.
“I’ve always wanted to go there.”
“Maybe next year.”
“When things settle down.”
“After I save a little more money.”
“One day.”
One day.
Two of the most dangerous words in the English language.
Because “one day” has a way of turning into five years.
Then ten.
Then twenty.
Before you know it, the places you dreamed about have become places you keep talking about instead of experiencing.
I’ve learned that most people aren’t waiting for a destination.
They’re waiting for permission.
Permission to spend the money.
Permission to take the time off.
Permission to leave their comfort zone.
Permission to put themselves first.
And sometimes, permission to experience a place differently than they ever have before.
I didn’t realize I needed that last one until Nashville.
I Thought I Knew Nashville
I had been to Nashville plenty of times before this trip.
But I had never really experienced Nashville.
There’s a difference.
For years, Nashville meant basketball tournaments with my son.
Hotels.
Gyms.
Tournament schedules
Finding somewhere to eat between games.
Getting up early the next morning and doing it all over again.
If you’ve ever traveled for youth sports, you already know.
You can spend an entire weekend in a city and barely see anything beyond the hotel, the gym, and whatever restaurant is still open when the last game ends.
That was Nashville for me.
I had been there.
I just hadn’t seen it.
I knew the highways.
I knew the hotels.
I knew the basketball schedule.
But I didn’t know Nashville.
I had never walked down Broadway.
I had never listened to live music pouring out of every doorway.
I had never visited the National Museum of African American Music.
I had never danced at Coyote Ugly.
I had never experienced the city everyone else talked about.
And then my best friend said we were going back for one of our friend’s birthdays.
This time there were no basketball games.
No tournament schedule.
No rushing to get to a gym.
We were going to hang out.
And funny enough, my first reaction wasn’t excitement.
It was:
What am I going to wear?
Because in my mind, Nashville automatically meant cowboy everything.
Cowboy boots.
Cowboy hats.
Denim.
Western jewelry.
The only cowboy thing I owned was a pair of red cowboy boots.
That was it.
For a minute, I really didn’t want to go.
Looking back, it sounds ridiculous.
I had been invited on a weekend away with my friends, and I was about to let clothes talk me out of it.
Thank God for Amazon Prime.
I ordered a hat, some jewelry, and a few T-shirts, and everything arrived the next day.
Then I went shopping in my daughter’s stuff.
Between what I ordered, what I already had, and what I found from her, we started coordinating outfits.
Little by little, the looks came together.
And something else started happening.
I started getting excited.
That’s one of the things I love about traveling. Sometimes the trip begins before you ever leave home.
It starts with the group chats.
The outfits.
The packing.
The “What are you wearing Friday night?”
The anticipation.
By the time I zipped my bag, I wasn’t thinking about why I shouldn’t go anymore.
I was ready.
Sometimes the Drive Is Part of the Story
We drove from Atlanta to Nashville.
Our friend was driving at first and, Lord, she was scaring the hell out of us.
She may have been perfectly comfortable behind that wheel.
The rest of us were not.
So when we spotted one of those Western stores along the way, nobody needed convincing to stop.
It was the perfect excuse to get out of the car, stretch our legs, and look around.
Of course, once we got inside, it turned into shopping.
I found the perfect belt.
The other ladies found a few things too, and before long we were back at the car, loading up our new goodies.
Only this time...
I took the wheel.
Everybody could relax.
And honestly, so could I.
That may not sound like some big travel moment, but those are the parts I remember.
The laughing.
The stopping.
Finding something you weren’t looking for.
Talking nonsense in the car.
The journey becoming part of the memory before you even arrive.
By the time we pulled into Nashville, we were ready to see what the city had been hiding from me all those years.
Nashville Looked Completely Different This Time
We got to the hotel, took quick showers, got dressed, and headed out.
Then I stepped onto Broadway.
And Nashville looked nothing like the Nashville I knew.
Music was coming from everywhere.
Not just one bar.
Everywhere.
You could hear one band while walking past another. Music poured through open doors and drifted into the street. Neon lights stretched down Broadway while crowds moved from one place to the next. Both sides of the street were packed with bars and people.
And the bachelorette parties! There were women everywhere celebrating brides-to-be.
The brides wore their sashes and crowns with so much pride and excitement. Their friends surrounded them, laughing, taking pictures, and celebrating.
You couldn’t help but get caught up in everybody else’s happiness.
That entire street felt like somebody was celebrating something.
A birthday.
A wedding.
A girls’ trip.
Life.
And I remember taking it all in and thinking...
How have I been to Nashville all these times and never seen this?
That’s when something clicked for me.
Sometimes we think we know a place because we’ve been there before.
But we may only know the version of that place connected to our responsibilities.
I knew basketball Nashville. I was finally meeting Nashville.
And apparently Nashville did not believe in going to bed early.
Neither did we.
We stayed out until the bars closed around three in the morning.
Yes. We closed the bar.
And somewhere around two in the morning, I saw something that immediately made me think about home.
A huge Raising Cane’s.
Open.
At two o’clock in the morning.
My son loves Cane’s.
So naturally, I had to stop and take a selfie and send it to him. I was out with my friends, dressed like a cowgirl, somewhere around two in the morning in Nashville... and still thinking about my child.
Some things never change. No matter where I go, I’m still somebody’s mama.
Then Our Over-40 Bodies Entered the Conversation
The next day, we got up and went to brunch at a day party.
Now, the sun will wear you OUT.
We were eating, drinking, talking, enjoying the music and having a good time.
But by about six that evening, we were back at the hotel.
Tired.
We had already decided we were going back out that night.
That was the plan. But apparently nobody had discussed the plan with our bodies.
Six o’clock came.
Nobody moved.
Seven.
Still nothing.
Ten o’clock.
Everybody was still lying around.
You know that kind of tired where nobody actually says, “We’re not going back out,” because nobody wants to be the one to admit defeat?
That was us.
Then around eleven, people finally started rolling around.
Somebody said what all of us needed to hear.
“We’re not old. We came here to have fun.”
That woke everybody up.
Now we were scrambling.
Getting dressed.
Doing hair.
Makeup.
Finding shoes.
Trying to pull ourselves back together.
We finally got out around 12:30 in the morning.
Remember, everybody on this trip was over forty.
And if you’re over forty, you already understand the relationship we have with our beds.
Going out two nights back-to-back is one thing.
Doing it on little sleep after being in the sun all day with some drinks involved?
Our minds were saying:
Let’s go!
Our bodies were saying:
Girl... absolutely not.
We went anyway.
Because there was one place all of us agreed we had to experience.
"Coyote Ugly."
Yes.
The one from the movie.
“Girl, Get on the Bar.”
When we walked into Coyote Ugly, women were on top of the bar dancing.
Immediately I thought:
YES. We’re doing this.
Then I got a little closer.
And suddenly:
Never mind.
I can’t dance.
At least that’s what I told myself.
I watched the other women up there having the time of their lives and started doing what we sometimes do when something scares us.
Talking myself out of it.
You don’t dance.
You’re going to look crazy.
Just stay down here.
Then my other voice showed up.
The one that doesn’t always use the nicest language.
Girl, stop being a bitch.
Take a shot or two and get up there.
Sometimes you have to listen to that voice.
So I did.
A shot or two later, my no-dancing self was standing on top of the bar.
Doing my thing.
Was I the best dancer up there?
Absolutely not.
Did I care?
Not one bit.
For those few minutes, I felt like I was part of the movie.
And I was having FUN.
Not thinking about whether I looked silly.
Not thinking about who was watching.
Not worrying about what I was “supposed” to be doing at my age.
Just enjoying the moment.
That experience taught me something I didn’t expect to learn in a bar.
Sometimes you have to listen to that little voice inside you that says:
Do it anyway.
Not every uncomfortable feeling is telling you to stop.
Sometimes it’s fear trying to keep you in the same place.
And sometimes the memory waiting on the other side of that fear is worth climbing on the damn bar.
Then Nashville Made Me Slow Down
What I loved about that weekend was that Nashville gave me both sides.
There was the loud Nashville.
Broadway.
The bars.
The day parties.
Coyote Ugly.
Then there was another experience that made me slow all the way down.
The National Museum of African American Music.
I knew I would enjoy it.
I didn’t expect it to affect me the way it did.
Walking through the museum felt like walking through pieces of our history.
I got to see how the music I grew up with connected to the music that came before it.
Gospel.
Blues.
Jazz.
Soul.
R&B.
Hip-hop.
I loved seeing how hip-hop started and how something that grew from Black communities became a worldwide culture.
I saw Whitney Houston’s stage outfits.
Queen Latifah.
Albums and artists I recognized.
Then there were names and stories I didn’t know, which made me want to stop and learn more.
That’s what I loved about it.
I wasn’t just looking at memorabilia.
I was learning.
You could see how one generation influenced another and how Black artists helped shape the soundtrack of America.
Standing there, I thought about how much of our history lives inside music.
Songs tell you what people were celebrating.
What they were fighting against.
What they were surviving.
What they loved.
What they dreamed about.
I walked into that museum because it was something to do in Nashville.
I walked out feeling connected to something much bigger.
And that's another thing travel does.
Sometimes you go somewhere expecting to be entertained...
and leave educated, inspired or changed.
Imagine If I Had Said No
When I think about that trip now, I keep coming back to the fact that I almost didn’t go.
Over clothes.
Imagine that.
If I had said no, I would have missed dancing on the bar at Coyote Ugly.
I would have missed seeing Broadway come alive at night.
I would have missed all those brides walking around proudly in their crowns and sashes.
I would have missed the National Museum of African American Music and learning more about the history of our music.
I would have missed trying new food.
I would have missed being a cowgirl for a weekend.
I would have missed laughing with my friends when we were exhausted and should have been sleeping.
I would have missed being the designated driver and knowing the people I loved could sit back, relax and not be on edge.
I would have missed taking a silly selfie in front of Raising Cane’s at two in the morning because it reminded me of my son.
And I would have missed finally experiencing a city I had already visited many times.
That’s the part that stays with me.
I had been to Nashville before.
I just hadn’t experienced Nashville like this.
And it made me wonder how often we do that in life.
We go somewhere for work.
For our children.
For an appointment.
For a tournament.
For somebody else’s event.
We drive the same streets and pass the same buildings and convince ourselves we’ve already seen the place.
But have we?
Or have we only experienced the version of it that our responsibilities allowed us to see?
That question followed me home.
Because if I could visit Nashville over and over and still discover an entirely different
Nashville...
what else have I been overlooking?
Maybe even in my own backyard.
These days, when I catch myself saying “one day,” I pay attention.
Because one day isn’t a date on the calendar. It’s a decision.
There will always be another bill.
Another responsibility.
Another reason to stay home.
And sometimes those reasons are valid.
But sometimes... we’re simply talking ourselves out of living.
I almost talked myself out of Nashville.
Instead, I said yes.
And years later, I don’t remember how tired I was.
I remember the music.
I remember my friends.
I remember the museum.
I remember laughing.
I remember those red cowboy boots.
And yes...
I remember dancing on that damn bar.
More than anything, I remember realizing that I had been to Nashville many times without ever truly experiencing it.
So now, when I catch myself saying “one day,” I ask a different question:
What am I missing because I think I already know it?
Sometimes the greatest adventure isn’t going somewhere new.
It’s seeing a familiar place with new eyes.
Until Next Time...
Simply Jaynae
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