So Much To Say

Amazing weekend!

The show was great, the drive was great, and everything in between was great.

Jen and I drove to Washington early saturday morning to watch dave matthews at the gorge on sunday night. The only regret I have is not buying tickets for the saturday night show as well. We came back yesterday, and some of the photos look amazing.

Saturday morning we caught the first ferry, and sat at the border for an hour or two. It wasn't bad at all. From there we went to the outlet mall, where I got some new shoes that I've been looking everywhere for. For lunch we went to Tulalip Casino for their lunch buffet, which is an amazing 10.95$. I was astonished by the quality of some of their food. They could get away with being a mediocre casino buffet that serves cheap food to the masses, but it was totally the opposite. Of course, I ate half the place.

A side note. When you order ice tea there, they give you actual tea, over ice. Very tasteless. Is it like that everywhere?

After lunch on saturday, we drove the remaining 250km's or whatever to the gorge. The last 200km were very scenic, and to see the Columbia river emerge from the desert was pretty cool. We drove down some deserted road, and at the crest of a hill we started to realize the magnitude of this weekend at the gorge. There were so many thousands of people camping. It was ridiculous! So many people. So we found a spot to camp, set up, crashed, and enjoyed our sunday thoroughly.

The show. We walked from our campsites to the amphitheater, which overlooks a curve in the Columbia. The walk was a few km's, so we brought alcohol on the walk (naturally). We were then screened through a gate like 100 meters in, where we had to ditch our booze. Weak. I wasn't about to pay for the 11$ beer inside. No really, 11$ tallboys.

When we got to the venue, we started looking for seats. I bet 20,000 people got there before us, and there were 10,000 people behind us. So seating was a challenge. As we found a mediocre spot, a few friends from back home found us, and showed us amazing seats. It was almost perfect. We enjoyed the last half of the O.A.R. set, and patiently waited dave.

DMB themselves were rad. The band opened with 'seek up', and got the crowd totally pumped. It was closing night so I figured it'd be pretty sweet. Their best intro to a song (in my opinion) was definitely 'warehouse'. It looked like this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8rdsBUuxd4

The best song they played was probably the last song before the encore, which was "all along the watchtower" with the "stairway to heaven" solo. Tim Reynolds was there with the band playing, and the guy is a sick guitarist.

I'm not sure how long the show went, but it was over two hours for sure. I heard that on friday and saturday night the band played for closer to three hours. When it was done, we had a long walk (more of a shuffle) back to camp, and the congestion of people made a canucks playoff game look like a florida marlins home game.

Yesterday was fairly uneventful. We woke up, packed up, and left by 8am. We stopped along the way, and caught the 545pm ferry home. All in all, it was an amazing weekend. The friends, the show, and the scenery made everything perfect.

And not a single thing went wrong all weekend.

'We're here for a good time. Not a long time'