We've had a lot of great experiences on this trip, with a lot of things that have gone very right when they could have gone very wrong. We've been blessed, but maybe never as much as we were during our one day vacation in Nashville.

I didn't have this stop as fully planned out as the others. We had considered getting tickets to the Grand Ole Opry, but the performers were not special to us, mostly oldtimers like Mel Tillis and Charlie Pride. Tickets were too expensive for a show we weren't that interested in.

We had our afternoon planned out - after arriving from my sister Carol's house in Little Rock we walked around the country music festival downtown. We ate at Jimmy Buffets, a woman on stilts made Jon a Viking helmet out of balloons, and we shopped for cowboy boots.

As we were buying some souvenirts at the Grand Ole Opry shop, I looked up behind the counter where they were advertising that night's show. I noticed that they had made a couple late additions to the lineup - American Idol Scottie McCreery and runnerup Lauren Alaina!

As you are probably aware, Rhonda and I have been big fans of the show for ten years, and Scotty is Rhonda's favorite contestant EVER. So right away we called the box office to see if we could get tickets, but all they had were two standing room tickets.

Not willing to give up so easily, we drove over to the Opry to wait around to see if there were any last minute cancellations. We got up to the ticket window, and after telling the woman how much we wanted to see the show, she typed some stuff into her terminal and came up with three seats in the 10th row!

During the show, Rhonda prompted me to go down front to get a good picture of the Idol kids performing at their Opry debut. I went down front just in front of a pack of screaming girls. I was trapped, and as a result I witnessed the historic occasion from about ten feet away!

From time to time Scotty would look down at us and wave or wink and all the gilrs would go berserk. Not sure what he thought of the old guy ...