Since I hadn’t been to Nashville in over 20 years, I wanted a high level tour of the city to help us get the lay of the land and see where the major sites were to determine what we wanted to visit later. There are lots of different city tour options, but many of them involve adult beverages and entertainment. Of the more family-friendly options, I narrowed it down to the Hop On Hop Off Trolley Tour and the Joyride Golf Cart Tour. I decided on the golf cart tour because I thought it would offer a more personalized experience.
I had a frustrating experience booking the tour. On their booking website, the system defaults to 2 adults and does not allow you to change it to 1. Since my husband was not interested in joining us, it was just going to be one adult and two kids in our group. I understand that they might have had a minimum of two people required to run the tour, but we were going to be three and the system would not let me change it to match our group arrangement. Since the price of kids tickets was $20 less, I really wasn’t interested in being forced to book 2 adults and 1 kid to get around it. So I called them to schedule the tour… 4 times. The first three times the person on the phone was unable to help me (not at a computer?!?) and asked me to call back later. I gave them one last chance a day later and was finally able to book. But the whole experience was way more difficult than it should have been. I shouldn’t have to work that hard to give a company my business.
I booked an 11 am tour and got a text from our guide the day before confirming. When I asked if their location was within walking distance of our hotel, he said it was a bit of a walk and offered to pick us up instead. I really appreciated that! It saved me from having to deal with driving there and parking and was really convenient for us. I believe the option for hotel pickup depends on where you are staying (and possibly how many others are taking the tour) but this was a big bonus to me.
Our guide picked us up outside the hotel and we headed out into the streets on Nashville. The golf carts are street legal and travel on the regular roads with the rest of the traffic, although he mentioned that they were only allowed on streets with a speed limit of 35 or below. We immediately headed towards Broadway, driving through the heart of the city and then towards the river. We went up a few blocks and then back over, circling around in different areas of downtown. We went by the capitol area before making our first (and only) stop.
Marathon Village is a group of buildings that was the home of Marathon Motor Works in the early 1900s. Starting in 1910, Marathon produced their cars (and all of their parts) in this Nashville location. The cars soared in popularity and the company had trouble keeping up with demand and ultimately had to stop production in 1915. The buildings stood vacant for decades before being purchased and refurbished in the 1990s. Today the original buildings house retail shops and restaurants, as well as a small museum displaying 4 of the 9 Marathon cars still in existence. We took a quick walk through the one-room museum and marveled at the old cars.
We continued the tour through Music Row, the Gulch neighborhood, and some other areas before ending back at our hotel. Our tour guide was nice and super knowledgeable but not especially dynamic. We learned a lot while touring the city but wouldn’t say we had a ton of fun. One of the things I had most been looking forward to was taking pictures of the city. Their website says “we stop for photo opportunities at the most picturesque spots.” But we didn’t stop once for photos (aside from the quick visit to the Marathon Museum). We drove past all the city highlights – places I recognized from photos on their own website and from people’s reviews on Trip Advisor – but were never given the opportunity to stop and take photos.
I wanted to love this tour (especially since I gave my husband a hard time for wanting to skip it) but it just didn’t deliver. The customer service was bad from the start and the tour itself was just ok. I am still glad we did it because we got to see parts of the city I otherwise wouldn’t have visited and I learned some interesting facts from our guide. But overall it did not live up to my expectations or the many great reviews I had read.
