for those about to rock...

i love road-trip driving.

cruise control, 70mph speed limits, classic rock cassette tapes, windshield wiper adventures, feeling confident in my navigation skills, the company of my brother and the combination of our singing/punch dance skills (special ac/dc punch-dancing), sour gummy worms...i love it all.

from the get-go (starting with saturday evening when we actually bought our concert tickets), everything fell into place for this trip. even when we pulled into what should have been the Days Inn i booked our hotel at, but really it was a new hotel with no actual identifiable signage, we found no problem with our alleged reservation or accommodations. it all just worked out.

gift certificates to the outback steakhouse resulted in a gigantic dinner of steak, ribs, mashed potatoes, and cheese fries for us prior to the event we had driven 6 hours for to begin with. and then, as we navigated our way to the quicken loans arena, the trip got epic.

to begin with, our seats were amazing. let's review how we got these seats to begin with: about two months ago, joe allegedly bought us tickets. he was then unavailable, field training for a month in the mojave desert. when he got back, he had a message from ticketmaster saying there was a problem with his purchase. it then took joe another month (up until 2 days before we left) to finally call ticketmaster and confirm that no, we did not have tickets anymore, and never did. let it be known that i texted him the number to call 4 times because he kept deleting it, and reminded him to call on a daily basis for two straight weeks, ha. this is my brother at his finest :)

anyhew, saturday night we went online to see if there were still tickets. i think it's also worth mentioning that every single concert prior to cleveland's, AND almost every concert of ac/dc's upcoming european tour has sold out completely. cleveland, however, by some miracle, was not sold out. (it was obviously meant to be). and so, we bought our tickets, booked a hotel, and rented a car for my mother to use while we borrowed hers, all 2 days prior to the concert.

and our seats? stage right, almost floor level. an awesome view, and definitely worth waaaay more than we spent. turns out, a bunch of the people in our section also bought tickets on saturday, and the general consensus was that for whatever reason, the venue held back some tickets and we were lucky lucky bastards.

AC/DC was unbelievable. they sounded truly amazing live, and despite their age, their stagemanship, costumes, and sound was undiminished and flawless. hilarious stage props and shenanigans provoked laughs and many many cheers. as for joe and i? we punch-danced ourselves silly to all the great classics (yes, including thunderstruck...3rd in the lineup thank you very much). we took a bunch of silly, one-armed, off kilter pictures of ourselves, and took lots of video of the concert itself in an effort to preserve these memories.

now here's some silliness:

...we salute you