A Few Days Under Glass

This past week was Children's Pastors Conference at Orpyland. As a Children's Pastor, I loved going to this conference - it was a place I could relax, refresh and learn about new resources, ideas and best practices for ministering to children and families. Now that I work with Sweet Sleep, we were able to have a booth at CPC to tell churches about our work to provide beds for orphans.

Spending a very, very cold week at Opryland meant that we didn't want to leave for meals. And we didn't need to, anyway! Food there is fantastic... A few friends helped me out at the booth - Lauren, Jason and Sam.

Here's Lauren telling people about orphans and rocking her Sweet Sleep volunteer name badge. :)

Next to our booth were our friends from India Gospel League - Kait and Emily. We got to know them while our booths were next to each other at the Orange Conference last April. We love what they do (Em and I even sponsor a little boy from India through IGL!) and we had lots of fun hanging out, sharing ideas for how to do what we do better and enjoying some awesome food.

Here are Kait and Emily from IGL enjoying an awesome grilled cheese sandwich at Findley's Irish Pub. (I call it P.J. O'Flannigans - not sure why - makes me smile, though.)

The sandwich was awesome and oozing beautiful goat cheese goodness. Even comes with tomato soup for dipping. I had this one day this week, too - so yummy! We also consumed a lot of a special soup they had this week - roasted garlic. So. Awesome.

(not great for working a booth - i had to eat equal parts altoids to make up for the garlic!)

But our favorite meal of the week was wine and cheese at "The Library" - it's a really cool place inside the "Old Hickory Steakhouse" in the delta atrium at the hotel... The food at Old Hickory is awesome but our favorite thing to do there is to order a cheese plate. This awesome guy comes by with a cart with cheeses from all over the world. He tells you about all of them with such passion and then builds a plate for you around what you like. Then he tells you what to start with and how to work your way around from mildest to strongest. You also get some fruitcakey bites and some quince paste along with a whole basket of breads and crackers. So amazing! Kait almost cried she was so in love with the whole experience. Actually, I think she did. Another friend now in love with the hotel that we love so much. :) YAY!

Whether you're in town for a visit, or live in Nashville and are looking for a place to get away and feel far from home, head out to Opryland and get away from it all. It doesn't hurt that you can watch it snow outside while wearing short sleeves since everything is under glass... :)