Day 1:

April 12th, 2023. Champagne Sunday is heading to Nashville, by way of Montana and South Dakota, for an unprecedented seven weeks away from our beloved Tacoma home, friends and fans, and our precious Rudy. Our goal is to come home with more connections, maybe some new business ventures on the horizon, and a whole lotta lessons learned, stories to tell, and much more material to create songs about!

This can only mean one thing…

TOUR is upon us once more!

I honestly have a lot to say about this upcoming adventure to Nashville, but Id like to save those thoughts for the blog on the fourteen-hour drive from South Dakota to our rental home in East Nashville. Until then, we’ve got a lot of cool things to accomplish! So let’s get driving!!!

An absolutely beautiful and familiar drive today, taking us peacefully and without incident through the mountains and into the state of Montana, which we have grown to be so fond of over the past few years. At some point, I realized I’d been holding my breath for a good hour or so with the heaviness of brain activity that accompanies the bustle of the past couple days of prep for this trip. Once we got into Montana, I let out a sigh and knew it was all forward from here on out and finally relaxed…a bit.

Our sweet Rudyard is no stranger to his parents taking off and galavanting into the abyss of the US, insisting that we are needed out “there” and “the calling is strong” and “we must go” and so on and so forth. Most of the time he is with us for our musical shenanigans, but, as he’s gotten older, we have seen the benefit of leaving him at home to help keep him in a routine, stay close with his school mates, and stay on a “normal” education schedule. So the times we tour when he’s in school, he stays behind. This particular tour will be the longest away from him to date, and as you can imagine, that really weighed on Jared and I. Lucky for us, Rudy had a spring break right before we left. So, we selfishly monopolized his time and soaked up every second of each day with him before we left. I originally thought that would make it harder to go, but it truly had us all so saturated with love and gooey family saccharine, that saying goodbye was totally manageable. Jared loves the quote, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” Absolutely true! But just so you can understand the loveliness of our week…

All in all, we made the absolute BEST of our week before departure and our hearts are fueled with love and ready to go spread that out to all we meet!

If you made it this far through all the super-sappy family love-fest photos, congratulations!!! You are officially on the road with Champagne Sunday! We will do our best to fill your living room, workplace, bedroom, toilet time, or really wherever you do your inter-web browsing, with enticing tales from our shows, insightful nuggets from our encounters, entertaining yarns from our mishaps, and an all-around honest, but optimistic view of our beautiful country, the kindness (hopefully) of strangers, and look at what it’s like to be a (for now) unknown band putting ourselves out there time and time again!

“What a time to be alive! I wouldn’t trade it for the world!”
Happy Day, Champagne Sunday


2 Replies to “Day 1: Smashville Tour ’23”

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