Nashville (cont.)

After blogging yesterday about Nashville, I went home and felt like I hadn't quite done the trip justice.  Here's a more detailed break-down of what we did on our trip.

Thursday: We left St. Peters in the early afternoon and made it to Nashville by the late evening.  We went out to dinner at a place I'll not go back to, but we had a nice time together.

Friday:  We went shopping at the Opry Mills Mall and ate lunch at the Rainforest Cafe.  We toured the Aquarium restaurant (SO COOL! sharks, eels, sting rays, all kinds of fish!)

Since Amanda & Uncle Craig had come to Nashville several times before, they were sort of our tour guides around town and helped us find all kinds of cool stuff to do.

Who knows/cares what she's pointing at?  The whole place was cool, but the point of that picture is to show how excited the kids are to see all of it.

It was the Grand Reopening of the mall since the big flood had hit about 2 years ago, so it was really busy.  There was live music at the mall.  Nick & I got into an argument for most of the day about something dumb (who really remembers that a month later?).  We took pictures at the Opry (see the post from yesterday) and bought our tickets for that night.  The CMT awards were in LA on Sunday, so no big names were in town.  Still we went to the Opry and saw Patty Loveless and a bunch of other performers.  It was neat to say that we'd been there.

Saturday: We went back to the mall and the Opry to pick up the souvenirs that we hadn't bought the day before.  Amanda got some super cute boots that she's going to wear in the wedding.  After that, we went to downtown Nashville for more shopping.  We ate lunch at Margaritaville (more pictures in yesterday's post).
                                                     
We shopped all day.  After naps (for everyone) at the hotel, I took the kids swimming.  Then we went downtown to the Wild Horse Saloon.  It was a blast, maybe my favorite part of the trip.  Ella's favorite dance is the Cupid Shuffle, so of course we did that.  She & I also learned a new line dance called Boots.  It was a lot of fun.  I've never been to such a family friendly bar/night club.  This was also the night of the terrifying flat tire incident.  The awful screeching....I thought for sure we would be murdered on this deserted stretch of road.  It was scary, but we tried to make the best of it (again see the picture in the other post).

Sunday: We went to breakfast at Shoney's and then to the American Pickers store.  The trip home was full of detours (thanks a lot state of Illinois--you ALWAYS have construction that causes me at least an hour delay!)  Here's a video at the pinnacle of frustration in our car.  You can't see anything....just listen.

The entire time, driving was the running joke on our vacation.  There were just so many wrong turns, and yelling (in the other car of course....we were just following every wrong turn....), that at a certain point it became hysterical.  Even though it was stressful then, I think I'll always look back on that part of vacation as a joke.  Funny how time can do that to memories.

Anyway, I just wanted to be sure that I did justice to our mini-vacation.  It was a great time with the Johnson family.