Nashville and Crazy Birds

My niece Katie got married in Nashville this past weekend and it was such a happy event.  It makes me smile as I think about it as I write this. I have a soft spot for Katie.  I met her when she was two years old and I was dating my husband.  I remember the first time I met her. She had just woken up from a nap and her blonde hair was wild and she had on a pair of tiny little eye glasses.  She was always such a happy little girl and so funny.  Anyway, she got married this weekend so my daughter Kelsey and I made it a girl’s trip weekend.  My husband and son stayed home….my husband ruptured a disk in his back as I mentioned in a previous post so he was not quite able to go with us (and we are headed down to Florida for surgery soon) so it was just me and Kelsey for the weekend where we got a taste of Nashville and tossed in a beautiful wedding in to the mix. 

The only negative was that I did not take my good camera with me and I have very few photos to prove that we were even there! I am especially disappointed because neither a photo of me or of my daughter posing with Elvis on a street corner turned out!   And I have almost no photos of the wedding itself.  But let me make go ahead and make the best of what little I do have and show a few of the photos that did turn out. 

     

The wedding ceremony and reception was held at the Riverwood Mansion in Nashville.  What a gorgeous place.  Someone told us it was built back in 1790 and it was grand.

 

The ceremony was held in a garden and the reception was held in the Pavillion and it was beautiful.

When we first got to Nashville on Friday, I noticed when we were in the taxi that a few doors down from our hotel was just the kind of store that I love to paw around in. It was called Cake Vintage and Knobstoppers.   It had tables and boxes of old salvaged things sitting out in front.  It wasn’t hard to convince my SIL Mary and Linda to join us as we dug around in the all of their bins of “stuff”.

I found 4 wonderful door plates with great details and keyholes in these two bins that I quickly snapped up. 

My daughter Kelsey picked out 10 glass doorknobs that she is going to use to make wine stoppers out of for all of her friends for Christmas this year.  ( Those door knobs ended up looking suspicious enough on the x-ray screen that TSA at the airport pulled her bag and did a search.  I have to say, Nashville airport has some of the nicest TSA agents.  They were very nice about it.)

I would have bought way more things there than I did because the thought of how we were going to get all of it home on the airplane forced me to show some restraint. 

       

I loved these black and white dishes and how cute are those doorplate/skeleton key door knob hooks?  I also picked up a pad of black paper placemats that had these crazy adorable birds on them that my SIL Linda pointed out to me.  Those are the birds you see in the top photo.  I took them home with me and have been happily decoupaging them onto all sorts of things.  You know you’ll be seeing more of them in the future don’t you!

  We stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn Vanderbuilt near Vanderbuilt University and had a very nice stay there.  I only have good things to say about it if you don’t count the lack of electricity on Saturday morning.   :)   Of course, I had just got out of the shower and had a towel on my head when everything went dark.  It caused mild panic in some of the wedding party staying there but all was corrected and my hair was saved about 20 minutes later when the power came back on.  Nice hotel, the staff was very friendly and helpful  and I have to say the hotel restaurant was VERY good.  Carmelized Pear, Candied Walnut, Brie, and Arugula Flatbread and a cold glass of Pinot Grigio started off our dinner on Friday night and the food just kept getting better.  We took a taxi to the hotel and then relied on the shuttle the rest of the time.  If we had come for a longer stay I would have rented a car because there were a few other spots like Franklin, Tennessee  and some shopping sites that I would have liked to have visited but really we didn’t have enough time. 

         

Anyway… On Saturday morning we took a shuttle from our hotel down to where all the action is. It’s the craziest thing. Restaurants, Honky Tonks and Bars all playing live Country Music at 11:00 in the morning. I am sure they were playing even earlier than that but that’s when we got there. And shops selling cowboy boots were everywhere!

All of the music that we listened to was VERY good.  And one of the highlights of the weekend was when we were in Layla’s listening to the band in the photo above.  When they were finished with their set and putting away their instruments making way for the next band to come on, some pre-recorded music was piped in.  I felt a tap on my shoulder and it was my nephew Pat who said “Can you hear this song?  I wrote that.”  He really did!  Pat is very talented and records as Patrick Thomas and is part of the group Hotels and Highways and he wrote the song Train Whistle.   The song was picked up and recorded by another artist and that’s what we were listening to….in a bar…in Nashville.  So cool!

So, all in all it was a great getaway and if you get the chance to visit Nashville, I say do it!  Not a Country Music fan?  You will be by the time you go home.