Let's Go for a ride- Sunday at the Loveless Motel and Restaurant, on the Natchez Trace, and in Leiper's Fork.

Part One- The Loveless Motel and Restaurant


When I moved to Nashville in 1981 the Loveless was a little country restaurant out on Highway 100. There was a working motel attached to it, and it would not have been too different from other mom and pop eateries with big southern spreads, had it not been a mandatory stop for visiting celebrities, whose photos still cover one wall. It had excellent peach preserves and great breakfast biscuits and it was the place to take family from out of town. I used to mail my family the Loveless's preserves at Christmas. Back then there were no crowds and there was no wait, and I remember one breakfast there with some of the other young nurses who worked nights at St Thomas Hospital. I shook a lazy ketchup bottle, and it exploded all over my white uniform. We were young and this was funny, and before long we did not have to wear white anymore anyway, so I remember it fondly, just as I remember Cheryl Buck and my other friends calling each other "Belle". They even called me Belle, and I was a Yankee, but that was a long time ago.

I digress. The Loveless has changed hands, and to me looks like a prisoner of its old fame. The motel is closed, and on the weekend the Loveless is overrun by tourists and by motorcyclists and bicyclists starting their trek down the Natchez Trace Parkway. The restaurant even serves granola now. The Spandex-clad Bicycle Boys on their Italian racing bikes will never eat grits or country ham. Never. It was dawn when I took these pictures. A man was working in the barbecue shack, but I decided to move on to the Natchez Trace.