A wonderful 2 year anniversary celebration

We left Nashville about 930 AM with plans to meet a friend from Pfizer days in Lexington KY for lunch at 1230 completely forgetting about the one hour time difference. Fortunately Daniela was able to move a meeting around so that she could do lunch at 130 instead. Then we drove to the wrong location of the restaurant. She sent me the correct one but when I plugged it into Maps, the other one came up and I didn’t notice there were 2. Not a great start for our weekend.

However, we had a great lunch and made it to our Airbnb in Cincinatti with about 20 minutes to get ready to go to Riverbend Music Center. Since we had never been to this venue, we wanted to allow plenty of time. We ended up parking as far away from the venue as possible. Fortunately the temperature was tolerable so the walk wasn’t too bad. We met up with college friends Kris and Bill, grabbed some water and went to sit down. Their seats were a couple of rows from ours but they sat next to us, planning to move when someone came for the seats. The couple ended up coming in during the 3rd opener but preferred our friend’s seats so it worked out great.

During the first opening act, Natalie came out and we were able to see her for a few minutes. The openers were good, but we were there to see Natalie!!. The show was amazing. None of us were familiar with Keith’s music so there was no nostalgia. It was pure awe and joy watching the amazing musicianship from every single person on stage.

Natalie was all over the stage playing the fiddle, guitar, mandolin and banjo. Keith is an incredible performer and very natural in his interactions with the crowd. They performed one duet and Natalie KILLED it. This is the song they performed at a previous show. I can’t seem to post my own video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWq_hy_lPWc

Natalie radiated joy from beginning to the end of the show as we all did. It was an amazing way to celebrate our two years together.

The venue did an amazing job of routing the traffic out of the parking areas. By the time we got to our car, the area was nearly empty. Our route was several miles through the countryside before we could get back to main roads. When we were almost back to our Airbnb we decided we were hungry – we hadn’t eaten dinner. We spent the next 2 hours criss-crossing between Cincinnati and KY trying to find a place that was open late. We ended up at a Waffle House that was only doing take out. So we ate our breakfast on picnic tables for an adjacent pizza place. It was the best Waffle House meal ever.

The next day we drove cross country to Kris and Bill’s place outside Greenville OH. Greenville is an amazingly vibrant community of just less than 13K. We have a tradition of sharing a pitcher of margaritas at a local restaurant. The pitcher and each glass comes with flashing lights and rubber ducks. Very festive.

We are back home and we will be dog sitting for Hazel, a Pomeranian, for about 10 days. I kept Hazel for a month in 2020 and she was very well behaved. Now I must get organized for 2 overlapping events for the Robertson County Democratic Party on July 3.