Sunday, March 29, 2009

Alan Jackson Concert



After belly-aching all day about going out in the cold, agonizing over nothing to wear, finally deciding on a sweater and jeans..we ventured out to the brand new Hartman Arena located across the highway from the existing Coliseum. VERY ODD. We drove North on I-135 (is that right...I really just know it as the canal route) and when we got to 61st street exit noticed cars lined up on the shoulder. The Hartman Arena is located at the 77th street exit! Oh my gosh..we were 1 1/2 hours early and traffic was horrible. Jim wisely decided to zip up to 85th and come back South to
77th street in hopes that exit wasn't so bad. It wasn't nearly that crowded but we were still stopped at the bottom of the exit ramp off the canal route. We weren't even close to the Hartman Arena. Finally after about 1/2 hour of creeping up the off-ramp, a police officer came and directed traffic and it got a tiny bit more efficient. By the time we parked (7:00 a full hour after we got off the highway), we heard that the line on the canal route was backed up over 4 miles each direction.

Anyway, the place was pretty empty for the first hour of the concert (so many people were stuck on the highway) and so we moved from our VERY squished seats between the big man in the Harley shirt with the lip piercings and the couple intent on producing a pregnancy that evening. Yikes, I obviously don't get out to many concerts. We moved over to what was probably considered the complete nosebleed section but was actually great! Able to see the stage head on, we kicked our feet up on the seats in front of us and really enjoyed the show. Alan sang all his greatest hits and everyone sang along, it was a lot of fun. Kind of a mixed crowd...young cowboys and lots of middle aged and older folks. We fit right in there somewhere.

We left during the encore thinking we'd beat the HIDEOUS traffic out of the place. Uh, no luck. I was driving and while we quickly backed into the LINE, the line was so long it would have been at least an hour to get out of the parking lot alone. Jim convinced some people to back up and so that we could cut through a line of cars and go the opposite direction towards another exit. That worked and we were on our way in about 1/2 hour. There had to be people still sitting there an hour later. The Hartman Arena's parking plan stinks. Anyway, had a lot of fun, AJ was great and Jake Owens (the opener) was pretty good too.

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