This past weekend I had the chance to feed my wanderlust and take a quick adult only weekend trip to Nashville. I am a huge country music fan and over the past year I have been keeping track of the cities where the Garth Brooks World Tour is performing, and he just happened to be visiting THE COUNTRY MUSIC city the weekend before my birthday. With it being so close to my birthday Dan practically had to agree to go. Not that it took much convincing since he also loves country music and a chance to get away together for a weekend.
Garth was everywhere 😉
Since we always try to travel on a budget, we chose to drive to Nashville which is about 560 miles from Detroit. It took about 9 1/2 hours including stops. It wasn’t too bad but I think we’ll consider flying next time so have more time to explore the city versus driving for two days straight.
This was actually our second time visiting Nashville but definitely won’t be the last. The first time was over a decade ago and the vacation destination spot where we planned to each run our first half marathon. Although we both ended up getting injured before race day and couldn’t run, we still visited and had a blast. I still plan to come back to finish a half that I never started!
Since the main purpose for visiting this time was to see the Garth Brooks concert we chose to not cram in a bunch of activities. Unfortunately I was exhausted when we arrived Friday night so we canceled our plans to re-visit a line dancing bar (Silverado) where we had danced 11 years ago. Thankfully I woke up Saturday feeling great. This gave us a chance to have plenty of time to explore the main strip of Broadway. This is where you’ll find tons of bars, restaurants and gift shops. We had a great time exploring the various bars with live country bands performing all kinds of country music. I would highly suggest checking out the strip during the day if you want the chance to see several bands and visit different bars. We explored the bars just a bit after the concert around midnight and as you might expect it turns into a college town with long lines just to get into the bars.
A few notable bars that we visited include The Stage: great atmosphere, rumored to have several country stars stop by on occasion; Honky Tonk Central: quite popular during the day on Saturday; and Legends Corner.
I would highly recommend seeing a concert in Nashville, especially at the Bridgestone Arena which is where we saw Garth Brooks perform. This was the second time I have seen him perform (first time was in Detroit), and the show was much more spectacular. He played longer at this show compared to Detroit (starting about 9 pm and playing almost until midnight!), and for his second encore he took special requests and would play them acoustic. It also helped that we had amazing seats on the main floor.
This is one of the many things I love about Garth Brooks – he charges the same amount per ticket no matter where the tickets are located in the venue. I just got lucky when I ordered tickets to get floor seats, although I did purchase them the second they went on sale. 
We stayed at the Fairfield Inn & Suites just a few miles from downtown and I would highly recommend it! It was quite new with a nice fitness center and the continental breakfast was excellent.
Oh and the weather in Nashville was a nice change from a foot of snow that we came from in Michigan. It was in the high 50’s and sunny all day Saturday! And now we’re back to reality. Happy Monday!
Disclaimer: This post is NOT sponsored in any way.
This A Quick Weekend Trip to Nashville post first appeared on Chocolate Slopes.
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