Six Months Old at a Nashville Hotel
Like Money Diaries but for traveling with an infant, part 2
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Today, part two in an on ongoing series of reviews for every hotel and Airbnb we stayed in during my daughter’s first year of life. How was the lodging set up to accommodate a baby? What were the important things to consider at each age, in each location? I’ll share my exact packing list which you can copy, including notes on what was useful to pack and what was not.
Plus, a few baby-friendly Nashville restaurant recommendations and my #1 west-to-east travel tip.
For part 1, see Four Months Old at a Seattle Hotel. Today we bring a six month old to Nashville.
The Basics
Who Went: Mom, dad, baby
Timing: Nov 2022
Child’s Age: Six months
Trip Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Reason for Trip: Work conference (at the hotel featured below) then family visit
Trip Length: Three nights @ hotel then six nights @ SIL’s home
Transportation: 4 hour flight from SNA-BNA (lap infant) on Southwest
Lodging: Noelle Nashville
Room: Superior Guest Room, 1 King Bed. $400-$500 per night (employer paid)
Food Status: Pumping, nursing & formula. I call this ‘doing it all’
Bathroom Status: Diapers
Sleep Status: 3 naps per day. Overnight sleep 12 hours, including a dream feed
See the 0-6 month old packing list for links to everything we traveled with.
The Location
When it comes to traveling with a baby, I would rate the location of the Noelle Nashville an eight out of ten.
To avoid the feeling of being stuck inside, I find walkability critical (it’s the New Yorker in me) so I loved that there were tons of restaurants within a few blocks from the Noelle, as well as the Times Square of Nashville: Broadway.
The downside to this location was that the hotel backs up to Printer’s Alley and while we did have fun going to the many bars there during one baby-free night out, it was not as fun hearing faint music all throughout the night. That said, the noise wasn’t nearly at the level I experienced at my hotel in San Pancho and with Nashville being the music capital it is, maybe it’s unreasonable to expect not to hear music wafting through the walls at all times.
If I were to visit Nashville with an infant, without being tied to a corporate hotel block (we were in town for my husband’s work conference), I would stay in a neighborhood like Germantown where my sister-in-law lives.
That area is a quick Uber outside of the center and has more unique, local spots versus the bustle and scale of downtown Nashville. Especially with a kid, the quieter environment and more chill pace of somewhere like Germantown is appealing.
The Hotel
The Noelle itself is a fusion of cowboy boots and modern art. I appreciated the tribute to Nashville’s culture without the memorabilia being too overt.
Importantly, the hotel had the cute Drug Store Coffee Shop right in the lobby.
During this stage of my baby being six months old, I was accustomed to becoming nap-trapped by the three nap schedule. Also, I was working remotely on this trip so I spent a lot more time in the hotel room than I otherwise would have if this were pure vacation.
Therefore the ability to strap the baby into the carrier and easily grab a coffee downstairs during her wake window was priceless.
The Room
We may have thought our hotel room at The Thompson Hotel in Seattle was small, but this room at the Noelle Nashville was even tighter.
It actually required us rearranging the furniture to set up our travel crib and Slumberpod!
The room did, however, have a comfortable chair that was useful for feeding as nursing and giving bottles on a bed can be painful for your back and requires some pillow arbitrage.
The comfy chair also came in handy as we were doing a dream feed during this stage, which helped our daughter sleep through the night without waking up to eat. When it came time each night for the dream feed, we picked the baby up and settled on the chair right next to the crib, with the lights off the whole time.
Originally, a desk and seat were located next to the comfy chair and parallel to the bed.
Upon realizing that the Slumberpod would not fit next to the bed on either side, we dragged the desk and seat to one side of the bed and positioned the travel crib in the still-tight space where they previously stood. This granted the person sleeping on that side of the bed very little room to move around but proved to be an effective solution for the baby’s bed set up.
We turned the standing closet into a de facto pantry.
The mini fridge housed freshly pumped milk (I always ask the hotel to clear the mini fridge in advance of our arrival) and on the shelves I arranged the bottles, pump, parts, formula and bibs for accessible bottle making.
While this hotel room was smaller than the one in Seattle, this bathroom had significantly more counter space - plenty of room for the bottle cleaning station & dirty parts to sit to one side of the sink and our toiletries to sit on the other. It’s the little things!
While traveling I prefer to rinse used bottles and pump parts immediately after use and store them in a bin until we can properly clean them, versus letting the milk or formula sit in the bottles over time. During our prior hotel stay we made a last-minute Target run for a plastic bin to store dirty bottles and this time my sister-in-law graciously brought us a tupperware container to use.
We were still sterilizing bottle parts at home at this age however we forewent sterilization while traveling.
A couple of takeaways:
The small size of hotel rooms in US cities has led us to book more Airbnbs instead of hotels as we continue to travel with our daughter. This trip was strike two for hotel room size.
Opt for walkability when your baby is taking several naps a day, especially if they don’t easily nap on the go, so you can get out and about during those wake windows.
The Packing List
My best recommendation is to make your packing list a living, shared document.
Static PDFs and iPhone notes don’t do it for me to feel organized when traveling with a baby, so I choose a google doc that I can share with my husband and where we actively check things off as they are packed.
Here is the link to Carry On's 0-6 Month Old Packing List. Feel free to make a copy and edit it to fit the needs of your trip.
Baby-Friendly Restaurants Around Nashville
My #1 Tip for Traveling West to East in the US
If you are traveling from west to east in the United States, my favorite tip is this: don’t worry about shifting your baby’s schedule to the new time zone. Keep their schedule in your local time zone!
In Nashville for example, the time difference for us was two hours. By keeping her on pacific time, the baby’s day started around 9am CT and she went to bed around 9pm CT, whereas at home in California it would be 7am - 7pm.
In my experience this allows for a quiet morning (few and far between these days!) and also makes it possible to do later dinners out with a baby in tow. So far I’ve used this trick on four trips with great success.
The baby may shift to the new time zone slightly after being away a week or more, but following this strategy makes the time zone transition more straightforward when you head back home, too.
New to Carry On? Check out the archive where most recently I wrote about Travel vs. Kids.
Thanks for reading!