11 hours of waiting for a 2 hour concet, that is what and it was well worth it!
Last Saturday Bon Jovi and his guys performed in Central Park on the Great Lawn as part of the MLB Allstar game that took place on Tuesday at Yankee Stadium. The tickets were free and because my friend Thom is part of the Bon Jovi fan club he was able to get two of 60,000 tickets that were distributed. Because they gave out so many tickets there was concern that not everyone would be able to see the show so we invested the time to ensure we could see the stage and it paid off!
9:00am Thom arrived at my apartment
9:30am We started standing in line at 70th and Central Park West right outside the park. We were most likely within the first 500 in line on the West side (it was anyone's guess as to what the line on the East side looked like).
10:15 Thom read his book, I talked on the phone
11:00 We became friends with the people inline in front of us and worked really hard to ignore the annoying people behind us
12:00 We continued catching up on life as it had been quite some time since Thom and I had seen each other
2:00 They started letting people into the park
2:15 Tickets were scanned
2:30 Bags and people were checked by security
3:00 The gates to the Great Lawn were opened and I experienced a modern day Oklahoma land grab, people dashed across the lawn to get as close to the stage as possible. It was chaotic.
3:05 After a little mix up on the part of security and some serious sprinting on our part we secured more than our fair share of lawn space about 20 people back from the stage near the center of the lawn by a metal barrier
4:30 We ate PBJ sandwiches, people watched, and tried our best not to die of heat stroke. The park was crowded and there was nothing to do but sit back, relax, and wait.
6:00 They started showing baseball clips and news on the big screens. Thom was a kid in a candy store. Watching baseball while waiting to see Bon Jovi in concert almost had Thom convinced that he had died and gone to heaven
7:30 The sponsors welcomed everyone to the concert and showed a video of the crowd from the stage. It was pretty amazing. We had no concept of how many people were behind us until we saw the park from this angle. It was a solid sea of people.
8:00 Bon Jovi and the boys took the stage and the BEST concert ever began!
10:00 The show had to end due to an agreement with the city and the park. It was a bitter sweet moment to know the best concert ever was over and now a memory.
10:30 I was home, tired, hungry, and hard of hearing because the concert was so loud but grinning from ear to ear because I had just seen Bon Jovi perform in Central Park, truely a once in a life time experience!
You can check out a video clip Thom took of Bad Medicine. The sound isn't all that great because it was so loud but it shows you how close we were to the stage!
great because it was so loud but it shows you how close we were to the stage!
This was definitely one for the memory books and a New York experience I will cherish forever.
4 comments:
you have such a cool life!! I am also a BonJovi fan and I think it is one of the only concerts that I would wait in line for 11 hours for.
Ditto that. You *do* have such a cool life Steph! And man, your hair is so long- love it!
I can not begin to tell you how jealous I am that you got to go to this concert. I almost flew back to the city just for this one event. And to think I could have spent house waiting in line with you again :) So jealous.
who knew that ThomCarter was the king of all things fun!
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