Nashville, Tennessee, has all the standard big-city amenities and more, but getting around and knowing where to go can be difficult because of traffic and the city's sprawling neighborhoods. To really see the sights and get a detailed picture of what Nashville has to offer, a bus tour is the way to go. Nashville offers plenty of options for a variety of bus tours to meet most travelers' needs.
In Nashville -- nicknamed "music city" -- music comes first, so a tour that showcases the city's rich musical history and booming music business is a must. The 90-minute Music Row Confidential Tour combines information on the music industry with southern charm -- self-described as "A cross between a history class and a NASCAR Tractor pull" on the organization's website. Tours are led by veteran Nashville singer-songwriters, who sometimes write songs for audiences on the spot. You can reserve tickets online. You can also hit all the historic music sites with Gray Line's Music City Trolley Hop, which takes passengers to several Nashville music hot spots -- including the Ryman Auditorium and the Country Music Hall of Fame. The tour departs each day and lasts for approximately one hour.
After you've hit the heart of Music City, take a more general look at Nashville with a historic tour. Gray Line's Discover Nashville tour takes half a day to cover the most important sites -- the Parthenon, the Bicentennial Mall and Farmers Market and the State Capitol building, for example. You can also take a deeper look at Nashville's history by taking the Civil War Tour, which shows passengers the remnants of the Battle of Franklin, known as one of the bloodiest of the war, that took place just outside Nashville. Your ticket includes admission to several historic sites, and the tour lasts approximately seven hours. Tickets are available for purchase online.
If you're looking for a lighter, more fun way to see Nashville, try one of its several comedy tours. The Nash Trash tour is an adults-only city tour that focuses more on comedy and less on the sights, though the sisters who run the tours will point out the more historic ones -- but it's essentially a comedic skit with audience interaction. You can bring your own drinks for the 90-minute tour. Another comedic tour of the city is the Redneck Comedy Bus Tour, which, like the Nash Trash tour, is more of a skit on wheels than an informative tour, but this one focuses a bit more on the city's history and even lets passengers disembark to take a look at some of the more popular sites. At the end of the two-hour tour, you can get "redneck certified."
Nashville is a city of music stars, so it's fitting to see how those stars live if you're traveling in Nashville. The Homes of the Stars Bus Tour will take you for a 3.5-hour ride through some of the most important spots in Nashville, but the trip culminates in a grand finale: a drive through some of the swankiest neighborhoods in the city to see the current and former homes of country music titans, such as Alan Jackson, Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift. If you're a fan of the Man in Black, take the 5.5-hour Johnny Cash tour with Gray Line to learn the deepest details of Cash's life and career. Among the stops on this tour are the largest collection of Cash memorabilia in the world at the Johnny Cash Museum and Cash's mother's house.
