Monday June 12th

.Monday June 12th


Today started awfully early at 4:45 when my alarm went off after only a few hours sleep. I quickly grabbed ,y belongings and scooted out the door leaving Krista to snooze until 8am.

I got the GPS programmed in the car and headed for the Interstate. I could not believe how packed it was! Cars doing 70-80mph and merging was a little 'problematic' to say the least...

Once I got a bit north of Nashville did things start to level out and lane changing wasn't a life altering experience.

The country side is mostly flat with tons of green trees in full bloom. There was a few interesting things along the way including all the advertisements from the recent Kentucky derby. There was also the Fruit of the Loom Headquarters! Wish I had time to stop by! Also saw a few advertisements for Fort Knox - also would have been great to see that!!

I rolled into the car rental place at 745 and was happy it was open even though hours started at 8am. Got out of there and walked 8 blocks to the hotel to attend my first session at 9 - and was told it was underway! What the heck? Ah-time change! Of course.

Sessions went all day and learned a great deal about numerous assessment strategies and philosophies.

Supper was in the hotel - they had a buffet set up with Kentucky's famous Chicken and Waffles! Hello Colonel Sanders!! There was salads and veggies including some whacky delicacies from the south like grits cakes, okra (yum!) and fried green tomatoes! Say what?? Yep - southern fried breaded green potatoes. They were ok but not remarkable.

I sat and visited a few folks from around the country and most of them were quite scholarly, working mostly from universities and here doing research on methodology and practice - not so much elementary classroom oriented.

I decided to catch a little scenery and walk around the downtown core (not the best idea with feet still a little blistered from Nashville but necessary)

I walked through the streets touring art museums and science centres, the world famous Louisville Slugger bat factory and many a restaurant.

Again - in the middle of nowhere - a same sized golden statue of David from Florence Italy! First the Pantheon in Nashville and now this - bizarre!

The coolest thing by far was a bench statue sitting down that identical to my high school teacher and friend Ed Tysowski! I put it on Facebook and even his kids all agreed it was a hell of a doppelgänger!

 I meandered my way down to the river to watch the sunset with the moving barges and steamboats in the 90 degree heat.

I eventually made my way back to the hotel and checked in and spent the evening watching the basketball game and Golden State winning the championship over Cleveland. Great game and off to bed

Sunday June 11th

• Sunday, June 11th

No sleeping in today as we were up and ready to roll by nine. We had to go pick up my rental car at 10 which took absolutely forever. They tried to upsell me to a more expensive car and more bells and whistle's and insurance and everything under the sun and we were finally able to get out of there by 11 with my super fantastic Kia Rio. They told me it would only get 18 miles to the gallon and I should upgrade to the Ford fiesta hybrid which gets 47 miles to the gallon but cost of extra $30. No thanks.

Sunday morning breakfast restaurants were off the charts busy but we were able to get into the waffle house for some bacon and eggs with Randy and Jeannette before heading down to the downtown core to watch some lesser-known acts during the day. Krista found us a great place to park for $20 so we could leave easily at the end of the night.

We made the long walk across the bridge to downtown and headed down Broadway Street to do a bit of shopping and find Krista something from Nashville. She found a really nice shirt. I couldn't find a nice shirt from the Nashville predators for less than $30 so thought we would check back later. 

We headed back down towards the river to the riverfront stage to catch Eric coombs and Eric Paslay. We caught the last two songs of one in the first two songs of the other before we had to leave because it was about 1,000,000° with no breeze. We wandered back downtown for a little while and found some air-conditioned buildings to recuperate in before heading over to the boat was her forever country stage to watch our retro acts that were performing today. 

I was extremely disappointed to have missed restless heart but I had seen them a couple years ago and Calgary so that was OK. Krista missed Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood on Saturday because of our late arrival and was quite choked about that but it's tricky trying to get to everything.

The first act up at 2 PM that we saw was Shenandoah. I was huge fans of their harmony back in the 80s and the first CD I ever bought in 1989 was their greatest hits album which I played through my Sony Discman and my car stereo all summer long. They perform their five or six huge hits and everyone clapped and cheered for every song. Even one of the finalists from the voice on Blake Shelton's team Lauren duski came out and sing a couple duets with them.

After that, Jamie and O'neal came out and saying a few of her big hits and was a crowd favorite. 

Then came a classic 90s band, Little Texas! They all still have big hair and simply phenomenally ! They rocked it up for a good 40 minutes and closed with their perennial favourite "God bless Texas" and the place went bananas!

Last but not least was the amazingly talented Collin Raye who's one song "my kind of girl" was one of our two wedding songs were Krista and I did some fancy dancing. 

After that we left and headed downtown to try to meet up with Randy and Jeanette but there were so many thousands of people filling downtown Nashville preparing for the Stanley Cup final game six that you could not move anywhere! They had a couple of giant screen TVs set up on the street andhundreds of launch chairs for people to relax and watch the game on. 

We got out of the downtown core and headed to a nice little restaurant we found call Joe's crabshack or we had some shrimp, fish and crab cakes before heading back across the river on the huge bridge to drop some things off in her car before the concert. We walked back to the concert and it was still boiling hot outside at 7:30 PM. We made our way to our seats and enjoyed watching restless heart perform the national anthem him before watching an amazing lineup on Sunday night consisting of Tracy Lawrence, the brothers Osborne, Darius Rucker, little big town, Keith urban and Brad paisley. Each band did about five or six songs over a 30 minute and had the crowd partying till the last song.

We walked back to the car at the end of the concert in complete awe of the previous four days and all the amazing country music artists we had seen, places we had travelled and amazing adventures we'd had while here in Nashville. I sure hope to get back here again some day as the city is fantastic, clean and we had an amazing time. We had to make a few detours before dropping off our friends and getting to bed after 1 AM. Getting up at 4:45 AM was going to come very early and make for a very long day on Monday.