Whew, this was a long day! I’m cooked.
We had to be downstairs by 7:30 a.m. for breakfast. Then it was a FULL day of presentations. Like legit 8-5 nonstop with 1 hour for lunch (which was served upstairs in a different ballroom and was actually AMAZING) and a couple of short coffee breaks.
No pics from the day but my brain was fried by the end!!
We wrapped up at 5 and had plans to meet in the lobby at 6 to head out for our 6:30 dinner reservations.
I regrouped and cleaned up and changed into less “professional” attire for the evening out.
We went The 404 Kitchen and it was SO GOOD!!!! Seriously delicious. I am not usually a “spend $65 on a meal + margarita for one” type of person, but this actually seemed worth it. lol! (Besides, I’ll get some reimbursement $$! Ha.)
I had the scallop risotto and omg it was to die for.
We also shared a cornbread for the table and a side of roasted Brussels sprouts which were both absolutely delicious as well. I’d highly recommend this place!
On the way out I peeked in the bar which was super cool.
Over dinner, it sounded like everyone was planning to head back to the hotel after. It was maybe ~8 pm, not even, though, and I was thinking, ok, I really want to go hear some music!! Last night we got dinner on Broadway but didn’t get to any honky tonks. I didn’t want to let yet another night go by…
After mentally debating if they’d think it was weird if I just hopped out of the Uber on the way past Broadway or not, I gingerly asked if anyone was up for even 30 minutes of music?? (The restaurant was about a mile from the main drag.)
I knew my boss wanted to just go back, which was perfectly fine. But to my happy surprise, the other two both said they were up for going out for a bit longer!
We ended up just walking from the restaurant to Broadway and stopped into a random place where a bouncer eating a piece of chicken had said, “Come on in!” (Literally, my coworker was like, let’s go here! He said come on in! 😆😆)
The band was just getting going.
Also, they had buy one /get one free on all beers! So I ordered a local beer and gave the other one to my coworker. What a deal.
We stayed for maybe 45 minutes? It was lots of fun! Heard some Shania, Alan Jackson, Garth, Johnny Cash…. Among others.
There was an entertaining table of Australians (!! Who knew?! They like country?) who were, let’s just say, possibly a bit inebriated, next to us. On TWO different occasions we watched the guy pull out a $100 bill and go up and tip the band and put in requests. We were like 😳😳… I thought the Australian exchange rate was bad right now?? Apparently not! Either that or they think our money is Monopoly money!
We called it a night by maybe 9:30 (anticipating another loooong conference day tomorrow) and decided to actually walk the 1.5 miles back to the hotel. (Away from the strip it was slightly more remote, so I wouldn’t have walked it alone, but with a group of 3 it was totally fine. Also, it was the most gorgeous weather! Beautiful night.)
And now, bed time! I’m tired!! 😴
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful for a fun time so far.
GRATEFUL KAE 
You made it a fun day after a long day of conference. I would have definitely just stay in, not even dine out because I am falling asleep before 8pm.
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I’m glad that the other girls were interested in staying out and listening to some music. I am so lame on work trips so like I said in my last comment, I do not do anything fun generally when traveling. Last week during our offsight, I was the second person to leave the HH on Monday night (at 7:30). Then I was the first person to leave the dinner on Tuesday night (at about 10pm!!) although after I walked out, another female coworker came out and asked if she could share my uber as she was ready to go, too. Both nights a group of people went to another location after HH/dinner so were out past 11 and that is just NOT FOR ME. Ha. But I am such an early bird and have kind of high sleep needs so I am definitely NOT the most fun person at all.
Your outfits look so cute! You packed well for this trip!
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I think it’s a drastically different situation for you and your work trips compared to what I just had. For you, the travel is just standard work duties, and you do it SO often that it would be impossible to get excited and want to “go out” all the time. Now, maybe if you only traveled a few times a year- then yes, I could see “living it up” on those more rare occasions. But if you’re going 2-3x/ month, and you have a busy life with littles at home, I can absolutely see why you’d want to just sort of skip out and relax!! For me, this was a “treat” type thing and I viewed it almost like a vacation, sort of. Not really, but kind of! And I don’t know when I’ll get to go to another- next year I think they’ll send the other half of our team, so I’m sure I won’t get to go.
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A lot of great country singers are Australian – Keith Urban and Jamie O’Neal are popular in the States, but Australia has a lot of homegrown country artists who are mostly famous in their home country like Slim Dusty and Sara Storer. It’s kind of a cool crossover thing!
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Yes, that’s true!!! I forgot about Keith Urban. Not sure how, since he’s great! That does make more sense then that Australians would be all about Nashville! The next night we sat by people from Montreal! I guess Nashville has some real international appeal, which is fun.
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That sounds fun! I’m imagining how thrilled the band was to get those tips… or maybe that type of thing happens all the time? Anyway, you’re definitely making the most of your time in Nashville.
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The bands definitely were not shy about repeatedly asking for tips and pointing out “we make our living from tips”…at one place they were saying like, “For $100 we’ll play… (I forget now which song).” So they were going around with tip jar to add up to the $100 before they’d play the song. That felt a little much to me- like, ok, people will tip but let’s not push it SO hard?!
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Let’s put it this way – I don’t have super expensive meals very often, but when I do and they are memorable, it’s worth every penny. There’s a nice steak restaurant in our town where the bill for the two of us is always well north of $100 and I remember that the meal that I had with Lisa in Minneapolis was pretty pricey but dang it was good food. And hey if work is picking up some of the tab it’s even better! And yay that other folks were down to go out with you to hear the music. Can you imagine if you hadn’t said anything and everyone just went back to the hotel?
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Yeah, this food really was amazing! Made me rethink my stance on generally avoiding fancier restaurants! I guess it’s just hard, because other times I’ve been fancy places and have been like, eh, it was good, but not like, $50 good. (Or, I will think, this was nice, but I could have had an equally nice time eating a burger at the microbrew down the street.)
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That sounds like a really long day, but so glad you got to go out for dinner and to go listen to some country music! And what a cute country dress.
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Yes! Ended up getting 2 times out for music, so I feel satisfied with that! I’d definitely like to go back to Nashville, hopefully with Ivan. My parents love Nashville too, so I’d love to plan a weekend with us + them and I think that would be a real blast!
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