CMA Fest Day 1

So, there is no way I can fit in 6 days of Nashville into one post, so I'm going to do one a day :-)

Day 1-Wednesday

Holy crap....I had to get up at 3:45am to get started to get to Nashville by late afternoon! I took a quick shower and luckily we had already packed up most of the car the night before and headed on out around 5:30. The drive itself was pretty uneventful until we got into the mountains. By this time, it was lunch so we were just looking anywhere to stop and grab a bite. We saw an exit for a small cafe on the river and decided to try it out:





The food was OK, but better than that, we were even entertained by the staff. As we are waiting for our lunch, there is our waitress....she is sitting at a table with what has to be Willie Nelson's long lost cousin and they are discussing his moonshine. Seriously folks. She is asking for some...right now at 12 in the afternoon. At least "Willie" told her not while she was on the clock and continued to brag on the good quality shine he had. It was all we could do to get out of there without laughing!


Many more miles and hours of rain later and we make it into Nashville. Funny story just to share how tired we were. Our GPS kept telling us that we were going to get there at 2:35. We knew there was no way! 2:35 came and went and we were not even close. It wasn't until we got to the hotel that we realized the time zone change. Duh. My blonde moment taken care of for the week.


We got settled in and decided we would just drive to the lot where our parking pass was so we could figure out where we were going the next day. Neither of us had ever been to Nashville, so everything was all new. We got to the lot and saw a shuttle. Not having a clue where it was going, we thought "why not" and jumped on.


But I had no clue what was about to happen. The shuttle took us right into downtown. We walked about a block or so and saw a large group of people on the sidewalk. We went to check it out and realized we were standing right outside of the CMA awards red carpet! We saw all of the artists get out of their cars and limos and head in for the awards. We were half a block down from the actual entrance and no one was walking down to where we were....until Keith Urban came out. He came all the way down and actually spoke to me (although I have NO clue what he said to me now...shock of the moment I guess) and shook my hand. He was great about taking the time to see everyone!


Then about 30 minutes later, it was madness as Taylor Swift got out of her limo, went about 20 feet and then went inside to the awards. About 10 minutes later, she actually came back out and came down to us too! Of course keep in mind we were just going to get out to figure out where downtown was......I had been up since 3:45am, not wearing any makeup and was exhausted from the trip and it was HOT outside....but, Taylor let me get a picture with her (again, unprepared, so we had no camera. This was taken from Bobby's phone)




We did not go in as huge Taylor fans (although Kyleigh loves her), but I had to respect all she did for her fans.

After all of the drama, we found somewhere to grab dinner and then went to the Cadillac Ranch. We saw Steve Cochran, and he did a great job, but the other local bands were not that great. We stayed around hoping someone from the CMA's might show after it was over, but they never did. We headed back to the hotel to plan out our Thursday...the official first day of CMA Fest. We had planned to be at the convention center in the morning to get in line for several autographs...stay tuned to see how it all turned out!