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Opryland - Part 1
Written by: Dominick A. Miserandino
Photography by: Margherita Miserandino
True, 'down home,' southern hospitality at its finest can be found in one of Country Music's oldest living legends, Opryland. Just don't ask them for Iced Tea, or expect to have the last word. But they do it with a smile, so you may get used to it!
As far as I can tell, there is only one negative aspect in going to Opryland. Most of the populace who have never been to Nashville seems to believe that the town is simply the domain of Hee Haw, country music, and possibly a cowboy here and there. This is a fallacy, as it’s not entirely based on country music, and there certainly weren’t as many cowboys as I’d hope to have seen.
The weekend that we chose to go to Opryland also happened to have been the weekend of the first major snowstorm in Nashville in almost ten years. As we road in the shuttle from the airport to Opryland, the city appeared to be a beautiful, wintry, post-nuclear holocaust. Nobody was around; nobody was in the streets. Cars were left abandoned by the side of the road. Dogs and cats were playing together in the most unusual manner.
Nashville couldn’t handle the snow well.
We took the shuttle right to the front doors of Opryland and promptly ran right in to escape from the biting cold. Before I describe how it was walking in, I should describe how it looks on the outside. Opryland does look big. After all, it is the largest non-gaming hotel in the world. But that’s not why it looks big. On the outside, it looks big... not in a grandiose way, but in a rather enlarged way. It is so big that it defies any current architectural definitions. It has multiple main entrances from its many expansions. Picture your run-of-the-mill bulbous mansion that didn't learn the meaning of the phrase, "Stop expanding!" and now has expansions upon expansions.
Anyway, back to the inside. Opryland is made up of basically four different atriums. Each one has its own theme. The Cascades has cascading waterfalls (the name is appropriate)... the Delta is reminiscent of the Mississippi Delta (again, a good name), and the Garden Conservatory looks like an English garden, (again the naming is good). The Magnolia is the original atrium, which is much smaller and quaint, but a completely different scale then the others and isn’t as well named. Margherita, however, felt it was well-named because there is a "gorgeous Magnolia ceiling medallion," but that is in the ballroom and not the atrium, so it doesn’t count. You navigate through these four sections by following signs which, I might add, were extremely helpful.
But anyway, now that you have the lay of the land, I can go back to our thrilling adventure through the famous "blizzards of the South."
The first thing we did, after settling into the room, was what most people would, on the surface, consider the most boring thing to do in Opryland. I requested to see how this entire complex work: power plants, laundry chutes, and all. Nope, don’t let me see the entertainment, the shows, and fancy things. Leave that for another time. Show me how they manage to clean 2,881 rooms worth of bed linens. Show me how they manage to not have a blackout. Yes, the typical tourist stuff...
Anyway, before I could get the non-typical tour of the place, we felt that drudging through the snow caused us to work up an appetite, so we went downstairs from our room to eat amongst the gardens at the Cascades Restaurant.
Cascades Restaurant, as the name implies, is in the Cascades Atrium and features seafood. So while you hear the rushing water, you can think about where the food that you ate had once lived.
It was here I learned that everybody in Opryland is mandated to be happy. I think it’s a rule, or they don’t get paid that week... but then again, I’m just guessing.
The waitress walked over, and I asked her for iced tea. It's a simple request, and I figured since Lipton and Nestea mass-produced the product over the years, it was a perfectly reasonable request.
"Now, why would you want to say 'iced' tea?" the waitress chuckled. "Every time you order tea, it's got ice."
Margherita nodded her head as if this was quite a common piece of knowledge in the world, and I was simply the only fool who didn’t know this.
I asked the waitress, "Then, may I ask, if I wanted coffee or tea for dessert, how would I order that type of tea?"
"Oh, that's Hot tea", she said quite simply, and walked away laughing and ho-hoing more than Santa on December 25th.
Margherita punched me for asking such silly questions. "And don't ask if they caught the fish right here, swimming in the atrium."
I'm not going to lie to you. I don't remember what we ate, but since Grandma told me recently, "Nobody cares what you ate; just whether it was good." Well, I'll just mention that it was good, but looking around at the atrium distracted me. This is the kind of restaurant for looking around and seeing the world, not for just eating and running.
But, we broke the rules--and after eating, we ran.
Now off to the power plant.
The power plant is in a way, exactly as you’d expect and exactly what you wouldn’t expect mixed together. It’s a big building that’s rather loud. What takes up the entire interior of this large building looks like a really large car engine. We were told it could power up a small town. Computers are everywhere, and the noise is so loud, you’re forced to just point and grunt and hope everybody understands you.
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Deafened by the Power Plant | |
After being quite deafened by the roars of raw power, we headed over to the commissary.
Here is where I learned a bit about efficiency. Give a company enough money, and they'll solve any problem. The problem was simple: How do you prepare literally 10,000+ meals every day? How do you get the food ready for dozens of banquets at the same time without the guests catching on that they were getting kind of tired?
Easy. You divide half of the operations into the commissary, and they'll do much of the food preparation.
But how do you reduce costs? Streamline nearly everything.
To the average reader, you're probably saying "I really have no interest in learning about kitchens. Why are you doing this to me?"
Just picture this. I'm standing in the commissary, my wife Margherita is taking pictures of rather large ovens that you can walk into, and Mr. Commissary lifts up a large bag that looks like a darkened intravenous bag for a small giant.
The bag contains two gallons of lobster bisque. Why is that interesting? Maybe you didn’t understand me. The man had a report that could ID the exact bag; tell when it was made, how long it's good for, and how much it cost to make that bag. He could graph to his heart's content how much your exact bowl of soup cost. An insane amount of detail that only an obsessive/compulsive personality could enjoy. I get amazed by the little things. I can't even organize my messy drawer in the office. These bags then get delivered to the various restaurants at Opryland by trucks and/or a sophisticated tunnel system, so that each chef can finish the soup to his or her liking.
Insanity hath no limits like a rich corporation bent on service.
Our final stop was the laundry room, or should I say "building." This was the point that I admit I was getting nervous. I even said, "How the hell am I going to write about laundry?" Margherita said, "You don't do the laundry at home; how will you know what to write here?"
Thank you, dear. You are so supportive.
There are two reasons I had to see the laundry building. First was that it fit in quite neatly with my "obsessive-compulsive theory" about Opryland and their bent towards efficiency.
It seems that when workers come in for their shift, they wait on line to get their uniforms. After they get their uniforms, they scatter away into the famous tunnel system (as to not get in the guests’ way), and then they appear wherever they’re supposed to appear.
Seems simple, but no. Not to Gaylord Opryland. There was a clear problem here that needed to be fixed. The workers would wait up to 15 minutes for their uniforms. It was clearly not efficient enough. So, they ordered in a custom machine, which helped sort the clothes.
Do you remember the television cartoon, "The Jetsons?" Well, here a worker walks up to a "closet," punches in his or her code, and then magically within about 36 seconds a complete uniform appears. Behind the scenes is an extremely expensive system, which retrieves the uniform by matching barcodes. Problem solved--no more lines.
Mr. Gaylord Opryland sits back in his chair quite happy saying, "Excellent," while rolling his fingers against each other.
Read Part 1 | Read Part 2 | Read Part 3 | Read Part 4 | Read Part 5
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