Bedscape: Opryland Hotel in Nashville

When I got to my room at the Blissdom blogging conference in Nashville, naturally the first thing I did was photograph the bed. It's what I do.  The room was perfectly comfy, and the bathroom had two sinks, one inside the bathroom and one just outside, which is great if you're sharing a room with multiple ladies, all with different grooming commitments and schedules.

Keely checking out our view of the snowy pool.

Photo from Emmie's Mommy's Flickr stream.

The gift bag was an embroidered Lands End tote, very cute.  Happily, Blissdom did not reach BlogHer levels of swag, and I was able to escape with my dignity intact, not having bartered my soul for some canned-meat branded merchandise. Ugh, I still feel a ripple of shame when I think about it.

And this hotel, the Opryland. Oh my Lord, y'all. This is the place that got wrecked on the ground floors by the Nashville flooding last spring, yet they reopened in November. It is huge, like Vegas-huge, and is organized around three (or more?) glass-covered gardens. There are some exotic and beautiful plants there.  One of the gardens has a river running through it, and they give boat rides.  So it's all very over the top, but somehow not.  It's grand but still comforting.  Kind of like if Coleridge's Xanadu had been designed by Vera Bradley. 



Naturally, Keely and Beth and I had to take the boat ride.  Here we're setting out, and you can see that people's rooms face the garden with those little wrought-iron balconies. It's a pretty effect. It turns out that it's hard to take pictures in the dark while floating on the sacred river Alph, down to a sunless sea, but here are a few.

Just your typical purple indoor waterfall, like you have.

I love this picture of Beth and Keely because they look like the brightest, most attentive students in the world as they listen to our tour guide. At this point I think the guide was telling us that when they filled the river with water, at the hotel's opening ceremony, they poured it out of a giant Jack Daniels barrel. Which, of course they did. Please tell me something less surprising than that. You can't do it.

Putting aside the social aspects of Blissdom for a moment, I thought it was a good conference and well worth going to. It seemed a little more content-oriented than BlogHer, possibly because there weren't so many carnival sideshows going on all around and outside the meetings. I thought the sessions were useful, and a nice mix of big ideas and hands-on help with stuff, like photography.  The parties were nice and didn't have the sameness that the official BlogHer '10 parties tended to, as fun as they were.

The main event was getting to hang with my lovely friends, like Mary Anne and Michele, and meeting new people. I drove, which meant that I didn't have to be disciplined about my packing and could bring all the purses I want.  Also, every time we turned around, somebody was wanting to give us a manicure or a chair massage, or to stuff us with food every three hours like newborn babies, and who am I to argue with that?

And I got some ideas for this here blog. Also free panties.