The day of our performance at the 8th Annual Josie Music Awards went by in a flash. We had a full schedule of activities with little room for down time. Our “down time” consisted of being on the road to get to our next destination in a timely manner. Although we were rushed, we enjoyed our weekend in Nashville the best we could. If you are interested in reading about the day of our arrival in Nashville and our ‘experience’ at Buc-ee’s, feel free to read that blog which I will link down below!
Our busy day started with getting a quick workout before our rehearsal for the show. Hotel gyms are not the most ideal, but if you are determined to break a sweat while being on a business trip, you can make it work. After we finished working out, we started getting ready for rehearsal. Since we were only playing an acoustic set for the award show, it did not take much time to finalize our parts. We could not rehearse in our room since it would be a bit disturbing to nearby guests, so we rehearsed outside on the pool patio. When Dustin sings, he projects loudly so we were technically “disturbing” the guests anyway. A few guests did not seem to mind though, some were walking by and glancing out their windows enjoying the free show.
When rehearsal was over, we drove over to the Grand Ole Opry to visit an old friend of Dustin’s. I have always known the significance behind the Grand Ole Opry, but standing on its grounds for the first time helped me envision a goal. To give you a little history behind the popular music venue, the Grand Ole Opry is "country's most famous stage" and is the world's longest-running radio show in country music, so it is a pretty big deal. It would be an incredible opportunity to perform on that stage, but there is a big chance that may never happen. It sucks when you think about it, but it does give me the motivation to work hard and make that dream into a possibility.
Like I said in my previous blog, Dustin was nominated for an award and he ended up winning (yay!). After receiving his award, we had about three hours to kill before our performance, so why not explore Nashville right? There was a popular drum shop down the road from where we were at, so we decided to go and ‘experience’ it. If you are a drum enthusiast and are ever in the Nashville area, I highly recommend you stop by Nelson Drum Shop. I was told by my friend Evan Pearson (he is also my partner when it comes to making my drumming videos) to visit the shop and I am glad I took his advice. I felt like I was at a Toys “R” Us but for drummers (that place was cool back in the day). I found it neat being able to ‘experience’ a drum shop because all I am accustomed to are guitar stores. Not that there's anything wrong with guitar shops, but when you finally get to visit and ‘experience’ a store that is strictly “your” instrument, you have permission to geek out (which I did). Since we were pressed for time, I was not able to stay in the store as much as I wanted to, but it gives me more of a reason to visit Nelson’s another day in the future.
After I finished geeking out at Nelson’s, we drove to head towards the stage where we would be performing. Unfortunately, I do not remember much from our performance which sucks because it went by utterly fast. As soon as I looked at my watch, we were already off stage. It was an ‘experience’ though! (Also, if you are wondering why I keep emphasizing ‘experience’, you have to read the previous blog post to understand the back story, sorry)! From our performance, I recall having trouble hearing Dustin and Ryleigh’s voices through the floor monitors, but we managed to push through and put on the best show we could. It was also my first time ever (hopefully not last) performing in Nashville, so I thought it was neat to experience that alongside my good friends.
When we finished our performance, we headed towards the Nashville mall to eat dinner since it was about a mile away from the stage. Our wait time to get seated was about an hour so Dustin and I headed towards the Bass Pro shop to waste time. Like any other Bass Pro Shop, we found a boat inside so we sat there. Honestly, we could have slept on the boat since we were both exhausted from everything we had done up until then but we had a personal conversation instead - kind of like the ones I enjoy having on a long car ride, but this one was on a boat in a Bass Pro Shop (same thing right?). After having a heart to heart conversation, we left our boat (bye boat!) and then had dinner. It was nice to finally have some down time and not be rushed to be somewhere. We left the restaurant and headed towards our hotel to catch up on some Z’s, but then we remembered there was a jacuzzi across our room. Dustin, Ryleigh, and I took advantage of it so we spent a couple minutes enjoying the hot water. After a long day revolved around several activities, we finally got some shut eye. You can imagine how tired we were by the end of it! The next day I had to be up at 3AM to catch a flight, but I will write about that ‘experience’ another day! Like always, thank you for reading my posts and staying up to date with what I am doing!
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