21. April 2025
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A Musical Trip to CMA Fest 2019 (Trip Report Preview)

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

Already months ahead, I was looking forward to visiting the CMA Fest in Nashville. Not just that I fell in love to “Music City” during my first visit in 2017 – the country music festival annually impresses with an outstanding line-up. Summing it up, you can say that all stars of the genre gather in the magical Tennessee city.

In line with my 2018 series during having Six Intercontinental Flights in 72 Hours and following Weird Al Yankovic on his 2018 tour, I decided to write another Trip Report about these days.  This travel diary format will tell you about the stories and side stories of that travel. Of course, there will be a lot of spin-offs dealing with the major attractions I visited en route later on Flyctory.com. The trip report will end with arriving in Nashville. The CMA Fest is massive, you can have country music from roughly 11a.m. to 2a.m. in the night four days in a row, so that I will concentrate on enjoying the music rather than blogging about it.

 

On The Road to CMA Fest 2019 – My Trip

I had a quite interesting booking with a lot of flights and interesting connections for that route. However, there plenty of rebookings. My final booking was, including the return service:

Date Flight from to
31.05.2019 BA 935 Dusseldorf DUS London LHR
31.05.2019 BA 217 London LHR Washington IAD
02.06.2019 AA 5309 Washington DCA Chattanooga CHA
10.06.2019 AA 3714 Chattanooga CHA Dallas DFW
10.06.2019 AA 78 Dallas DFW London LHR
11.06.2019 AA 6514 London LHR Dusseldorf DUS

The original booking was

Date Flight from to
31.05.2019 AA 6364 Dusseldorf DUS London LHR
31.05.2019 AA 6207 London LHR Toronto YYZ
31.05.2019 AA 5542 Toronto YYZ Washington DCA
02.06.2019 AA 5309 Washington DCA Chattanooga CHA
10.06.2019 AA 4910 Chattanooga CHA Philadelphia PHL
10.06.2019 AA 6216 Philadelphia PHL London LHR
11.06.2019 AA 6514 London LHR Dusseldorf DUS

All intercontinental legs are Premium Economy. This was one cause of the multiple rebookings, as the original schedule was quite sensitive against minor schedule changes. On the other hand, American refused to upgrade to Business for services which do not have Premium Economy service. The rebooking service was very kind in all cases, even if some discussions were needed here and there. Unfortunately, the itinerary changes lead to the fact that I did not land in Ronald Reagan DCA airport any more. Due to the CMA Fest, reasonable returns from Nashville were tough to get. Thus I decided to go for Chattanooga, which I already visited on the second day of my Weird Al Tour 2018 trip.

There are dedicated reviews of the following flights:

 

Places and Stays.

After two days in Washington I majorly aimed to visit some places closely linked to Elvis Presley, namely his birthplace Tupelo and Graceland in Memphis. However, there are also some other additonal places along the road.

I opted for the following hotels during my trip:

There will be a lot of sights during the trip. Between Chattanooga and Nashville. After leaving Washington, I will focus on music-related attractions.

 

A Musical Trip to CMA Fest 2019 – Day by Day

Here are the links to the daily postings (link will be added once posting is published):

 

Flyctory.com about Country Music

Here are all Country Music-related postings on Flyctory.com:

Trip Reports

Here are all (other) Trip Report postings:

 

Flight map generated by the Great Circle Mapper – copyright © Karl L. Swartz.

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