Feeding Your Soul Series - Part 1
Whoa. Hey, guys. I’m still here! My baby blog has been getting neglected while I’ve been out livin’ life! Which made me think an Adventure-related blog was in order. Since I believe the key to a healthy life is living holistically and involves the mind, bod and s p i r i t… I am pro-adventure. Things like live music and travel are how I feed my soul, but really, anything can be an adventure if you make it one.
So what I’ve been up to is exactly that… checking out live music and traveling. I want to take you along on my adventures and what I learn from them to hopefully inspire you to get out there and find your own adventures. I’m going to do this in a series because I’ve been up to A LOT (if you follow me on Instagram you’ve seen me posting along the way).
First off, back in April I did both at the same time by going to one of my favorite places… NASHVILLE. Traveling to a place with live music literally everywhere. I went with my good gal pal and to be honest we had one of the worst travel experiences anyone in the history of the world has maybe ever experienced. What was supposed to be a quick getaway via a 1.5 flight arriving in Nashville at 8:30am ended up becoming an approximately 18 hour travel day.
Yah. You heard that right. EIGHTEEN HOURS. You can drive to Nashville and back from Chicago in that time.
Documented live via our angry Twitter ranting, my friend and I had our flight cancelled due to storms somewhere in between Chicago and Nash. In a desperate attempt to get the show on the road, we accepted a later flight to Dallas that would then get us to Nash by about 5pm at night. Sucked, but what else were we gonna do? Our flight to Dallas was delayed, but somewhere in the interim one flight to Nashville got through containing our luggage which we had been forced to check despite trying to carry on. Naturally.
Maybe the universe is trying to tell us something? Nahhh. Let’s figure out our next plan.
We tried a flight going out of another airline that inevitably got cancelled for the same reason. So OK, maaayybe we weren’t meant to go to Nashville today? Mayhaps the Universe was really trying to tell us something. Maybe we should go to Memphis instead? OR what if we get as close as possible to Nashville and then DRIVE the rest of the way?? Ok, yes. Let’s FLY to Memphis and rent a car. Cool.
Well then that flight gets delayed due to electrical issues. ::Audible sigh:: Eventually, we board our flight to Memphis. It goes a little something like this…
*Gets on flight to Memphis*
*Falls asleep*
*Wakes up in Birmingham, Alabama*
Wait.. where in the F are we??? MORE STORMS. Our flight landed in Birmingham because we were running out of fuel and then the lovely pilots announced that they were done for the evening. How nice for them. You can’t make this $h!t up, y’all.
So Plan L or whatever the heck plan we’re on now.. rent a car in Birmingham. Drive to Nash. We are frickin’ Thelma & Louise at this point. Planes, Trains & Automobiles up in here.
But WE DID IT! Arrived in Nash at roughly 2am. Seething that we lost an ENTIRE day of a 2.5 day trip. Still muttering to ourselves, “But what does it all meannnn??”
The next day we decided to cram everything we intended on doing in 2 days into 1. And we did so pretty dang successfully if I do say so myself!! We kicked it off on the Nashvegas strip.. Broadway. Live music on every roof and patio we could. Then headed out to East Nashville for some dinner, drinks and music at some of my favorite spots. Even caught a Cubs game on TV (baseball nerd alert)! And lastly, we went to Santa’s Pub which is a double wide where folks get all chummy and do karaoke. One of my favorite not-so-secret-anymore spots.
The next day, which was supposed to be our last day, we decided to enjoy as much of as possible before our flight. We had casually joked about getting tattoos, but by the time we checked out a tattoo place there wasn’t enough time before our flight to make it happen. Bummer. As we were getting ready to head back and pack, though, we finally got some reimbursement for our troubles from the airline and they extended our trip free of charge to make up for the lost day! Hardly a reimbursement, if you ask me, but something was better than nothing!
WOOHOO! One more day in Nashville!? What did we do?? You guessed it. We got those tattoos. My friend’s first and my fifth, but an awesome memory either way. Now that we had extra time we decided to head out to a spot a friend of mine worked at that I’d never been to just to say hello. It was a cool local spot, but the best part was that my friend gave us a recommendation for another place to check out that was particularly fun on Monday nights. The 5 Spot for Motown Monday’s.
NOW THIS WAS COOL. A completely unique experience. It was like walking onto the set of Dirty Dancing (but more PG than PG13). Folks were packed in, grooving to all different kinds of tunes, all dressed in their own styles and having the time of their lives. It was actually so much fun that we left believing that the reason for our travel woe’s was so that we got to experience Motown Monday. On top of that, another friend of mine that lives in Nashville had been out of town and flew back in that night so we got to say hello to him, as well. A very odd and random sequence of events, but that’s how the best adventures usually go.
We ended up spending way more money than planned and were quite a bit more exhausted than necessary, but with a pretty great story and a lot more character built from our struggles. Just to reiterate.. life is what you make it and literally ANYTHING can be an adventure. Listen to the Universe. Surrender to the experience. I’m glad I had an equally spontaneous pal by my side for this one because it could have gone very differently.
On Part 2 of my recent *Adventure* blog series, I’m going to get more specific with live music: which shows I’ve been attending and what live music does for me. Feel free to share your adventures with me, as well!
PS- probably just drive to Nashville next time you go. :P
Stay Wild,
Danielle
MS, RD, LDN