Nashville International

The Grand Ole Opry is the longest-running radio broadcast in American history — it first aired in November 1925 and has run continuously every week since, making it nearly a century old and still going. It began as the "WSM Barn Dance," got its enduring name in 1927, and grew into the show that defined country music, the stage every artist aspires to be "inducted" into. After decades at the downtown Ryman, the Opry moved in 1974 to the purpose-built Grand Ole Opry House out by the Cumberland River, where a circle of oak floorboards cut from the Ryman stage was set into the new stage so performers still stand on the same wood. The adjacent Opryland complex and the vast glass-atrium Gaylord Opryland hotel grew up around it.

Nashville earned "Music City" honestly: it's the center of the country music industry and home to the Ryman Auditorium — the 1892 tabernacle-turned-concert-hall that was the Grand Ole Opry's home for decades and is still considered the finest acoustic room in American music, the "Mother Church of Country Music." Downtown's Broadway is a neon canyon of honky-tonks; the Country Music Hall of Fame anchors the south end. And then there's the genuine oddity in Centennial Park: a full-scale, exact replica of the Parthenon, built for Tennessee's 1897 Centennial Exposition because Nashville styled itself "the Athens of the South." It's the only full-size reproduction of the Athens original in the world, and inside stands a 42-foot gilded statue of Athena — the tallest indoor sculpture in the Western Hemisphere.

The oldest registered distillery in the United States — federally registered in 1866 — sits in a hollow at Lynchburg, where a limestone cave spring runs a constant 56 degrees and feeds every drop of the whiskey. Jack Daniel's is defined by the Lincoln County Process: before aging, the new spirit is slowly filtered through ten feet of sugar-maple charcoal, which is what separates Tennessee whiskey from bourbon and gives it its mellow character. The charcoal is made on-site by burning ricks of maple. Here's the irony pilots and visitors love: Lynchburg sits in Moore County, which is dry — for most of the distillery's modern history you could tour the world-famous whiskey operation but not legally buy a drink in the town that makes it. (Commemorative bottles are now sold at the distillery itself.)

Bowling Green has built every Corvette since 1981, and the National Corvette Museum across the street from the GM assembly plant tells the full story — every generation, racing variants, prototypes, and the most famous moment in the museum's history: on February 12, 2014, a 60-foot-deep sinkhole opened in the Skydome floor and swallowed eight rare Corvettes. The collapse footage went viral; the museum kept the sinkhole as a permanent exhibit. Three of the cars have been restored, three are displayed as-is (mangled), and two were too far gone. From the air, the yellow Skydome is unmistakable.