The picturesque Tennessee town is famous for its Southern-themed music and landmarks. They include the State Capital building, Jack Daniels Distillery and copy of the Parthenon in Centennial Park.

If visiting Nashville on the first Saturday of any month, you can also enjoy its art treasures. Experience great music, original art and much more along the city’s Fifth Avenue of the Arts. Among other benefits is free wine and local food samples as you wander the art galleries and colorful street displays. www.nashvilledowntown.com/play/first-saturday-art-crawl

The realistic-looking backdrop was actually a flat photo. However, your travel4seniors.com editor’s recent trip to the veteran battleship in San Pedro CA harbor was an exciting event.

Brief history: The USS Iowa (BB-61) was launched at Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1942. In 1943, she took President Franklin D. Roosevelt across the Atlantic to the Tehran Conference with British Winston Churchill and Russian Josef Stalin. Then, in wartime 1944 and 1945, the Iowa was in active combat in Pacific campaigns with Army and Marine landings and shore bombardments.

It has been 22 years since the final scene of the 1994 movie Shawshank Redemption was shot at Sandy Point, St. Croix. The prison escapee portrayed by Tim Robbins works on his boat as Morgan Freeman, his just-paroled jail pal, finally arrives.

However, in Stephen King’s novel the guys were reunited on the beach in Zihuatanejo, not in the Caribbean, but some 3,000 miles west on the coast of Baja, Mexico. The hunted fugitive would never have gone to the U.S. Virgin Islands, risking being hauled back to prison to serve out his life sentence for a double murder he didn’t commit.

We recently returned from a family reunion in Florida. All in all, it was a pleasure to meet and schmooze with folks we just don't see often enough. But there were some drawbacks.

All the out-of-town visitors had to book local hotels, and the prices were out of sight. On our first night, we arrived at the airport behind schedule, so we had to spend the rest of the night ... only a couple of hours actually ... at a nearby airport motel before we could be picked up by car.