Mystery Vacation – Surprise Revealed!!

Our room at the B&B was very nice, but unfortunately I didn’t sleep the greatest and was up at 6. After lounging in bed for a bit I got up and checked my work emails and knocked a few things out. I then decided to look at the geocaching map and saw there were 5 geocaches that I could reasonably walk to. Tom said breakfast was at 9:00 so I showered and headed out about 8:10. I was able to get to 4 of the 5 caches before I had to be back for breakfast. It felt great to get out walk a bit since I had spent most of the day in the car the day before.

I made it back at exactly at 9:00 and when I walked in the B&B the smell of bacon hit me. Our host, Sierra, had cooked up scrambled eggs, bacon, and pancakes. They were so good. I don’t know how she cooked her bacon but it was some of the best bacon I’ve had. She also had out Whole Milk Yogurt made by Yoplait. It came in a glass jar and was thicker than regular yogurt. I really liked it. Overall we thought the breakfast was exceptional. The B&B itself was built in 2008 and is over 8000 square feet. It was originally built as somebody’s home not a B&B. The place is massive and decorated quite nice. I would rate the experience 5 stars.

Once again Tom had to finish up some work before we could hit the road so we didn’t leave until 10:30. We went back into Illinois to the city of Metropolis to take our picture with the large Superman statue outside of the courthouse, because who doesn’t want to take a picture with a large Superman statue? There was a geocache here that I attempted to find, but with 2 gentlemen cutting the grass and Tom putting a time crunch on me, I bailed on the attempt without finding it. Back in the car to the next mystery stop!

Since I was writing the blog in the car I didn’t really pay much attention to my surroundings. I told Tom I didn’t even know what state we were in, but as we rolled into town I saw a sign that said we were in Paris, Tennessee and he said our next stop was in this town. He asked if I knew why we might be stopping here, but I was not familiar with anything in Paris, Tennessee. I guessed maybe a sight of a meteor crash but he said that wasn’t it. Then I guessed since we were in Paris that there as an Eiffel Tower. Ding, ding, ding. That was the correct answer. He drove us to Eiffel Tower park where there was a small version of the Eiffel Tower. We took our obligatory picture, used the bathroom and I found a quick geocache before we were back on the road to the next mystery stop.

Driving to the next stop I was quite tired so I took advantage of being the passenger and closed my eyes for a bit. I don’t think I actually fell asleep but it was nice to rest. When I “woke up” I was thirsty and water wasn’t cutting it so I asked Tom to stop at a gas station where I could buy Gatorade or vitamin water. Since we were in the South I also bought some chicharrons, but were super disappointed with them. I think they were stale! We head back to the freeway and there was a sign for 24 East or 24 West to Memphis. Tom got on the road heading East as I was frantically telling him that Memphis was West. He said we had another stop to make before we went to Memphis. As we were driving along I saw a sign that said Nashville 33 miles. I asked Tom “Are we going to Nashville?” He said there was town we were visiting right before Nashville. It really didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me why we would come towards Nashville to turn around and head back to Memphis, so I started to think that our destination was Nashville. As we came into downtown Nashville Tom confirmed that we were staying in Nashville and not going to Memphis at all. I have to admit, my first reaction was not one of excitement or joy, but more of anger for having been lied to. I know the whole trip was a surprise and there was some deception, but he had given me an address in Memphis of where I thought we were staying to put on my leave request for work and I had told several people that we were going to Memphis. There is one thing in this world that bothers me more then anything, and it’s being lied to; and now I felt like I had lied as well.

We pulled up to the Grand Hyatt Nashville and went inside to check-in. The hotel’s name lived up to itself as it did feel very grand. At check-in they asked if we wanted to spend an extra $75/night for an upgraded room that would include club access that comes with free drinks during happy hour and breakfast. I said no, but Tom said we’ve come this far so yes we were going to do it. Who was I to argue . . ..Tom had planned this whole trip and paid for everything so sure . . . why not? We got our “free” water and cookie, got our stuff out of the car and headed up to our upgraded room. We had a corner room on the 20th floor that overlooked a construction sight, but also Broadway . . the main drag in Nashville. We dumped our stuff and went down to the 5th floor to get a drink from the pool bar and check out the pool area. It was very loud with a DJ blaring some music but we found a couple of seats to sit down and relax a minute. I already knew there was a concert involved at some point during the weekend so I asked Tom which day it was going to be. He told me it was tonight and right then I wished I had slept better the night before!! He also was insistent on going up to the rooftop bar. I really thought some friends might be meeting us at the hotel so when he suggested to go to the pool and then the rooftop bar I was scanning the areas looking for anybody I knew, but I didn’t see any familiar faces.

From the rooftop bar we had a great view of Broadway and downtown Nashville. We took some pictures and remembered to get one with Flat Kristin (our friend who is currently deployed). Tom then had me sit for a minute and presented me with a card. I opened it and the cover had a bunch of pictures from concerts we have attended in the past and on the inside were two printed tickets to an acoustic evening with Toad the Wet Sprocket. My spidey senses were up and my reaction was anything but joyous. Although Toad the Wet Sprocket was one of my favorite bands in the 90’s, they had just been at Summerfest this year and I chose to see Pop Evil over them. Tom wasn’t with me that night at Summerfest, so he may have forgotten that I told him that we had wondered over to the Toad show after Pop Evil was over and that they were so mellow compared to the band which we had just listened to and that I said I wasn’t sad that I didn’t get to see the whole Toad show. As I was looking at the tickets I also told him that he has mad Photshop skills and he already lied to me so I didn’t believe this was the actual concert he would bring me all the way to Nashville for. I told him I was going to Google it to see if it was legit, and he was laughing and said no don’t Google it. He asked me who I think we might be seeing, and although I had an idea I didn’t say it out loud, because if it wasn’t true I didn’t want to disappoint Tom.

After freshening up and changing clothes we went down to the Club Room and enjoyed our “free” happy hour drinks and quite a good spread of appetizers. We were originally just planning on having a small snack and then were going to grab dinner before the concert, but the spread was so good and filling that we decided to just make this our dinner. There were fresh cheeses and meats like prosciutto, salsa, shrimp cocktail (the shrimp were gigantic!), cream cheese spread thing on a cracker (yes I ate it, and it was not bad), salad, and fried cheese ball things. We walked out of there feeling quite content. As we were walking through the lobby towards the exit a man in front of us and slightly to the left was wearing a Pearl Jam t-shirt with a graphic on the back. I had casually glanced that way, saw the t-shirt and looked at Tom who had a coy smile on his face and I said, “Are we going to see Pearl Jam?”. He busted out a huge smile and said the gig was up! He knew that once we started walking toward the venue we would start seeing more and more people with Pearl Jam swag. I was super excited that this was the show we were going to see and it was the one I had suspected as well. As we got to Bridgestone Arena (just a few blocks from our hotel) we could already see the lines of people waiting to get in and waiting in line at a merchandise tent. We found which line we should be in to get into the venue and after waiting in line for a bit, an usher pointed us to another line as my purse backpack would need to go through the x-ray machine.

Soon we were inside and standing in another line for merchandise. There was no way I wasn’t buying a t-shirt after all the time, money, and effort Tom put in to make this happen; not to mention I really liked the design of the t-shirt I got. Tom also encouraged me to buy the commemorative concert poster since he had spent a little extra to get commorative tickets from Ticketmaster (although they haven’t showed up yet) and we could display them together. We got though our line and got to our seat just before 7:00. Tom said the concert started at 7:00 but as we sat down, the arena was mostly empty yet, so we didn’t have to worry about missing anything. The opening act was a solo artist known as Pluralone. We weren’t familiar with him but he sounded pretty good. Pearl Jam came on stage at 9:05p.m. and opened with the band sitting on stools playing “Nothingman”. It’s interesting they chose to open the concert with three slower songs before they ditched the stools and really got into rock mode. They played a total of 23 songs over 2 hours and 13 minutes. Tom had spent a pretty penny and got us some really amazing seats. We were three rows up on the right corner of the stage. Eddie Vedder (the lead singer) spent a considerable amount of time on this side of the stage. There were three young kids in the front row of the pit on that side that Eddie Vedder paid particular attention to. At one point during a musical interlude Eddie scanned the crowd and Tom pointed at him and Eddie pointed back. I then gave the rock sign of the devil horns and Eddie returned them!! So cool to feel that the lead singer had communicated with us! All-in-all it was a great show. The arena’s sound system was spot on and the band sounded great. I will say though that I stopped listening to Pearl Jam religiously after about 2000 so they did play quite a few songs that I was not familiar with. My only disappointment was that they didn’t play “Jeremy” or “Dissident”. I am still in shock that they closed with “Yellow Ledbetter”. The best songs for me of the night were “Alive”, “Better Man” and “Black”. The last time I saw Pearl Jam was in 1998 and Tom has never seen them, so that was extra special. Something else I had realized during the show was that 16 September is my enlistment date which was the same day as this concert. That is particularly significant because I was undecided about enlisting until I was talking with the personnel in Finance and Pearl Jam was playing on the radio in the background. With Pearl Jam being my favorite band at that time I thought that I surely could work where they listen to Pearl Jam and I could just deal with that Basic Training stuff when I got there. So I guess in some way, Pearl Jam helped influence my decision to join the military and how cool that I saw them in concert 27 years to the day I took my first oath of enlistment.

After the concert Tom and I wandered around Broadway with thousands of other people. We popped into one bar and enjoyed a beer while listening to a band play covers of alternative and popular rock songs. We left there and headed to find something to eat. We stood in line for Taco Bell (which also had live music), but the line was too long and not moving so we decided to bail. We ended up going up to the rooftop of Mellow Mushroom getting a slice of pizza and another beer. Feeling full and bloated we headed back to the hotel around 2:30a.m. What an amazing gift of an experience that I won’t soon forget that Tom gave me.