If you’re lucky your room will only be a 10-minute walk from your meeting room or convention floor. You will walk, and walk, and walk some more in this spread-out monstrosity. I actually saw shoe boxes outside two guest rooms as I walked down the hall one morning, undoubtedly from convention goers who felt a need to nip over to the Broadway Shoes store at the mall for something more suitable. The first thing to remember when packing for Opryland is…comfortable shoes. But it’s still the original, still one of the most popular convention hotels outside Vegas and Orlando, and still a very well-run property that succeeds despite its 2,711-room bulk. Opryland Nashville is now just one more property in the Gaylord convention hotel portfolio, run by even larger Marriott. Now the outdoor parking is a staggering $20 a day (in a huge open lot with a long walk), there are three indoor atria to walk through instead of one, and a routine shopping mall occupies the long-gone amusement park. There was even an amusement park next door to visit if there were kids along. The place was enough of an oddity to be a tourist attraction and hey, parking was free.

The city wasn’t nearly as hip and happening as it is now, so often when relatives would come visit I’d take them out to Opryland Hotel to see the indoor gardens. When I graduated from college in the late 1980s, I settled down in Nashville to work in the music business. It’s the biggest non-casino hotel outside of Las Vegas, but Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville is one of the best-run behemoths you could stay in.

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