Birthday Fun in Nashville

JJ turned 26 on Saturday!

To my wonderful wife: I love you, and cannot express in words how thankful I am for you. You're a blessing as a wife and a tremendous mom that Sawyer is lucky to have.

Now, onto the fun of our weekend. We've been traveling a lot, more on that later. On Saturday, we found ourselves in Nashville for the evening, after barely making our flight to get there. To celebrate the little lady's bday, we went out on the town for a fun progressive dinner.

We started at a restaurant called "Mirrors" for appetizers. We asked the waiter for his recommendations, and one of those he mentioned was something that I could barely pronounce and certainly didn't know what it was. So I asked for a description, and that didn't help much. I simply learned that it was something that was cut into strips and fried and served with a basil marinara sauce, or something like that. But then he said that this was the item that got their chef on the Food Network. Well you have to trust the Food Network, right? So we got it, and it was good... still don't know what it is.

Next we took a walk and ended up sitting outside an Islamic Center for quite awhile, greeting worshippers and quietly praying for them, while enjoying the fresh air and swatting mosquitoes.

We eventually found ourselves in the Taproom Bar, a nice quirky place with a simple enough menu but fantastic food. We enjoyed dinner and then drifted down the street to a coffee shop where we'd seen a band setting up earlier in the night. After entering, we noticed something wasn't quite right: tables adorned with desserts sat out, tubs full of ice-cold beverages sat on the patio, and everyone was looking at us funny. Turns out it was a joint birthday party for a couple of friends. They'd hired a Beatles cover band (complete with big black bowl cut hair and black buttoned-up shirts and pants) and rented out the coffee shop for the night. That's right, we crashed a birthday party on JJ's birthday! We talked to the hosts and gained an official invite, then enjoyed the party.

After sitting and listening to the Beatles and watching some awkward dancing for awhile, we hit the streets again in search of dessert. We ended up in a quaint little place and had some tasty Elvis cake to round out our night in Nashville. Much fun had, not a single picture taken. Sorry about that! We'll get some new ones up soon!