Thursday, Sept. 4 - We enjoyed a little impromptu
East Nashville Pub Crawl tonight with our friends, Tiff and Brenda, who were up from Chattanooga for a visit. We started with dinner at the always-great
Drifter's BBQ and then it was on for drinks at
Bar 308, a cool little gin-joint we've been wanting to visit. We ended the evening at the
Holland House Bar and Refuge which we hadn't been to in a long while and had forgotten what a cool place it is. We've definitely got to come back here for dinner sometime.
Friday, Sept. 5 - We had
VIP tickets for
Live on the Green tonight (their first time expanding into a weekend event) with
Augustana with our friends, Wayne, Chris and Tarryn.
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| Good food and drinks, clean bathrooms and front row views of Augustana in action. You gotta love VIP tickets at Live on the Green in downtown Nashville. Always a good time. |
Saturday, Sept. 6 - Today we had
VIP tickets again this time to see
Ingrid Michaelson and
LP at
Live on the Green. The weather was little steamy, but the rain held off which was most important.
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| This was our first time "seeing" the lovely Ingrid play live. We "heard" her live at Bonnaroo a few years back but the crowd was so big at the tent she was playing at that we couldn't even glimpse her on the stage. She put on a terrific hour-long set today including a surprise duet with another of our favorite performers, Mat Kearney. The most amazing fact was that this was Ingrid's first show since losing her mother only a week before. We feel privileged that she didn't cancel the show which she had every right to do, and her stirring cover of Coldplay's "Sky Full of Stars" that was dedicated to her mom to end the show was downright beautiful. Thank you so much, Ingrid. |
Note the date at the bottom of the Twitter post above. Well, that tweet worked pretty well! I tweeted in February and it became a reality in September!
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| The angelically-voiced LP wowed the crowd at Live on the Green with a full hour of songs from her debut album. Lots of folks knew the words to her songs and lots more folks became instant fans after her incredible performance. |
Sept. 12 - 13: We celebrated
Ashlee's birthday weekend in two different cities. We had dinner at
Alleia in Chattanooga on Friday with her family and some friends, and at
Suzy Wong's House of Yum in Nashville on Saturday with a bunch of other friends. And the
Baskins Robbins ice cream cake I got her was the bomb, ya'll!
September 19-21: We took a quick trip out to
Denver, Colorado for a
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals show at
Red Rocks Amphitheater (BUCKET LIST - CHECK!)
We flew in after work on Friday night along with our friends, Wayne and Bridgette. This was our first time in downtown Denver and we had a great time exploring a bit on Saturday morning before the show including some
shopping at the huge REI flagship store.
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| Red Rocks is a natural park that just happens to have an awesome amphitheater in it as well. We saw a beautiful heard of mule deer as we hiked up to the venue entrance from the parking lot. |
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| It was an anxious crowd waiting for the gates to open. |
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| The place is simply breath-taking and the sound was out of this world. Despite the fair skies at sunset, we did magically dodge some thunderstorms that swept across the area with only a few drops of rain hitting us and no stopping of the show that included two great openers, Lake Street Dive, and the tremendous Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue. That's downtown Denver poking out of the horizon way off in the distance. |
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| Ship Rock to the south (photo above), Creation Rock to the north and Stage Rock behind the performers make up the amazing set of "walls" to this natural amphitheater. |
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| We are just out of this shot (courtesy of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals) behind the mixing boards. There's not a bad seat in the place, but we were dead center for the whole amazing show, their first as headliners here. |
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| Monday morning before heading home, we were able to take a guided hike at Eldorado Canyon State Park near Boulder, Colorado. We did a +5-mile loop that swung beneath the Devil's Thumb which you can see jutting above the Flatiron Mountains in the photo above. Thanks to the wetter-than-normal summer, the wildflowers were still brilliant despite the time of year. |
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| The Maiden of the Mountain was another massive stone obelisk that we passed during our hike. |
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| After the hike, it was time to cool off with some tasty micro-brews and chow down on some great grub at Southern Sun Pub & Brewery in nearby downtown Boulder. Those are my two different IPA half-pints in the foreground and Ashlee's raspberry wheat ale in the background. All were excellent. |
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| It was a quick trip, but a memorable one. We got to cross Red Rocks off our Bucket List, see one of our favorite bands again for the umpteenth time and take in a little Rocky Mountain wilderness. We had a lot of laughs along the way (and learned some tough lessons about edibles). Our friend, Wayne, snapped this amusing picture at the Denver Airport on our way home. This happy family was actually sitting in a hallway waving at folks through this window as they came through security. Why? Who knows? But they were having fun and it had to make you smile a bit. |
LP
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