By MONTE DUTTON

I hope I’m going to get a bit more profound when I take stock of my three-day trip to Nashville, Tenn., which I cheerfully refer to as Music City USA, but not Nashvegas, because I like Nashville better.

I didn’t go there to party, although Mike Hembree, Larry Woody and I partied in the responsible manner of men advancing in age. We listened to great musicians playing old country music for tips in bars where there is no cover charge. I drank one beer. That’s three since I got out of the hospital 15-plus months ago. No doctor has told me I couldn’t drink. It’s just too much trouble. We had a designated driver among us and everything.

What I enjoyed more than anything else was conversations, five hours up and five hours back and riding around the traffic jams of another rapidly growing city. Time goes faster when folks are having fun.

Mike and Larry covered NASCAR with me for 20 years. Both of them rode the circuit more than twice as long as I. Mike still has a few irons in that diminishing fire.

I miss the people and places more fondly than the races.

Woodrow (as he is almost universally known in the ranks) is one of the two funniest men I’ve known and the only one surviving. He is as irreverent as a pirate’s parrot and not as repetitive.

Once, at Indianapolis, we were greeted one morning by news that a couple fans had perished from asphyxiation in an infield tent. Woodrow’s take: “Damn it. Now I’m going to have to change my crowd estimate.”

We were watching a boring race in Atlanta. I said, “The good news is I just finished my federal income tax.” Woodrow said, “I taught myself Portuguese.”

I sent the other two a few photos late last night. Woodrow’s reply: “Thanks for the photos; it was a fun trip and we need to do it again before they cart us off to the old folks’ home. We can tell the same old stories because we’ll have forgotten them by then.”

My preference is to take photos on an actual camera. Most everyone else on Lower Broadway was snapping away on a cell. Woodrow wasn’t. He’s content with a flip phone. I probably would be, too.

We battled the crowds – on a Monday night! – at the most famous beer joint, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, and then migrated to my favorite, Robert’s Western World, where I befriended a fiddle player from Massachusetts because he was passing around the tips bucket and I was wearing my Red Sox cap.

Lower Broadway has gotten lower and broader than when last I visited. The old block is still the best, but many new honky tonks have popped up for two more blocks, many of them opened by modern stars of the genre.

I liked country music better when the performers were uglier.

On Tuesday, we tramped the surrounding battlefields and cemetery of the Battle of Franklin. We toured Carnton, a plantation house used during the battle as a field hospital. According to legend, at battle’s end, six Confederate generals were lying dead on the front porch. The tour guide said it has been recently discovered that two of the generals had already been carted off to home. It was actually four generals and two colonels. History never stops. Blood never stops shedding.

We talked about our times following the NASCAR gypsies.

Once at Talladega, Carl Edwards’ car nearly bounced into the grandstands. At the scene, we saw fans rolling a tire up the steps. A fan had a welt all the way up his left arm from where a shock absorber hit it. He asked me if I thought Edwards would sign the shock. Rick Minter asked the man if he would sit in that location again. “Oh, yeah,” the man said. “That’s part of it.”

We got back to the press box. A release was being circulated to the effect that no pieces of the car had been found in the grandstands. “That’s true,” I said. “They’re all on E-Bay.”

Racing is much safer now. Thank God. It isn’t surprising that veterans of the Fourth Estate are prone to visit battlefields.

Thanks to Woodrow, I’m satisfied I enjoyed the best barbecue on Monday night and the best steak on Tuesday.

By the way, people are much bigger now than they were in the 1860s. The uniforms in the museum look as if they were worn by sixth graders. The chairs in the Carnton house dining room are tiny by today’s standards.

Mike and I thought about going to a movie Tuesday night. Instead, we found something on Netflix we hadn’t seen that was better.

Now that I live in a shoe box, a hotel room seems spacious.

Mike responded to my curiosity on what the modern race drivers are like. Now I just know what TV tells me. Mike mainly confirmed my suspicions. Even on site, the various entourages are a barrier. Writing about sports is mostly journalism by press conference. The last vestige of media freedom is the high schools and small colleges, but even in the latter the frontier is being fenced in.

West of Knoxville, Mike and I happened upon a barbecue joint where a man (and, undoubtedly, a woman) could enjoy a barbecue-sandwich plate for less than 10 bucks.

By the time I got home, I was ready to watch the Red Devils play ball again.

I first time heard Sheryl Crow sing “All I Wanna Do” while driving one of the various L.A. freeways. Our fun was a different kind, but the goal was the same.

Soon the sun is going to set on what I regularly write here. I’ll write about more topics. I’ll still write sports, just not comprehensively.

The site is supported by reader contributions. If you’re interested, you can make modest monthly payments on my Patreon page or a one-time contribution via Venmo (@DHKSports).

Or, if you’d like to make a contribution by check or cash, my mailing address is: Monte Dutton, P.O. 221, Clinton, S.C.  29325 (hutdut@outlook.com).

It means a lot to me that you enjoy what I write.

Most of my books are available at Amazon. Two of my novels, Cowboys Come Home and Lightning in a Bottle, are available in audio versions.