How to Get to Sonya Park (Your Map App Hasn't Met It Yet)

There is a street in West Nashville that your phone has not met yet. Sonya Terrace is short, new, and attached to Sonya Drive like a hyphen. On the open map data most apps lean on, it shows up as a nameless stub, and Sonya Drive itself gets filed under the wrong ZIP code. Type "Sonya Ter 37209" into a search bar and you may be delivered, politely, to a spot on Sonya Drive a few hundred yards short of sixteen brand-new townhomes, wondering if you've been had.

You have not. You're close. Here is how the last mile actually goes.

Start at Exit 199

Aim for Exit 199 on I-40, Old Hickory Boulevard. Your landmark is Charlotte Pike, which meets Old Hickory just north of the interstate and brings the Nashville West shopping center with it: a Target, a Costco, a Publix, a Starbucks with a drive-thru. Sonya Drive is on the other side, the south side. The MLS puts it plainly for westbound drivers: exit at Old Hickory Boulevard, left on Sonya Drive, right onto Sonya Terrace. Coming from any other direction, the rule is the same: get yourself pointed south on Old Hickory, away from Charlotte Pike. If you hit Charlotte Pike, you've gone north.

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You can literally hop on the interstate in less than a minute from your own driveway.

Left on Sonya Drive, right on Sonya Terrace

Turn onto Sonya Drive and slow down, because this is the part the apps get wrong. About three-tenths of a mile in, Sonya Terrace leaves to the right. It is a short street, and it comes up sooner than the blue dot expects. Older listing pins still floating around search results sit on Sonya Drive about a third of a mile northeast of the homes, which is exactly far enough to make you doubt yourself.

The fix is one tap. Open the pin in the box at the bottom of this story before you leave your own driveway. It sits on the parcel at 2008 Sonya Terrace, and eight of the sixteen homes are within about forty meters of it. You'll be parked before the app finishes recalculating.

What you see when you pull in

Four buildings, four homes each, three stories tall, stacked stone or brick on the fronts paired with fiber-cement siding. Every home has its own one-car garage with a concrete pad in front of it, so leave the driveways alone and pull into one of the guest bays along the street. The mailboxes stand directly across from 2010, which is the easiest way to orient yourself once you're out of the car. Don't go looking for a park entrance, either. Sonya Park is the name of the community, and the closest thing to a park here is the backdrop: the wooded hills of West Nashville lifting behind the rooflines, the view Will keeps spinning his camera around to find.

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look at the rolling hills that we've got back there, guys. It is just gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

The model is 2004, the staged one, with Craftsman-style trim and the furniture arranged so you can picture a Saturday in it. Joshua Terral, our agent on site, is there Thursday through Saturday from 10 to 6 and Sunday from noon to 6. In one visit he'll walk you through 2004; 2008, the end unit, with extra windows down its side and even one in the half bath; and 2010, the four-bedroom, with a garage deep enough for a longer vehicle.

Every road east starts on the same ramp

Will's on-camera shorthand for the location is Target. "If you're 5 minutes from Target," he says in the model-home film, "you know you're close to everything." Ours is less folksy: we ran the drives through mapping software on September 30, traffic-free, and rush hour runs longer on every one of them. The geography is simple once you've seen it. Downtown and Vanderbilt are each about fifteen minutes, Green Hills sixteen, the airport twenty-seven, and all of those trips begin the same way, back out to Old Hickory Boulevard and up the I-40 East ramp. Turn the other way, south on Old Hickory, and the Warner Parks are ten minutes off, more than 3,100 acres of hiking and horse trails across the ridges of the Highland Rim, with Highway 70 South and Bellevue about three miles down the road.

Errands split the same way. North on Charlotte Pike is Nashville West and the Costco where Will ate lunch before he filmed 2008 (a hot dog; he admits to the cookie), plus Land of a Thousand Hills for coffee. South in Bellevue there's a Kroger and, at One Bellevue Place, DeSano Pizzeria.

So: Exit 199, south on Old Hickory, left on Sonya Drive, right onto the little street the map hasn't named. Pull into a guest bay, look up past the rooflines at the hills, and walk to 2004, where Joshua will be waiting Thursday through Sunday. If your phone is still insisting you're somewhere back on Sonya Drive, let it. You're here.