August 2023 - Guns and Roses concert

This Friday Jacob and I took a quick road to trip to see GnR in Pittsburgh!
Jacob like rock music and learned a few GnR songs with his guitar teacher, and I would consider him a fan now. :-)

They are touring for summer of 2023 and I figured it would be a perfect concert for him to try! Unfortunately, they are in Toronto the day we are coming back from Greece, and we will be too jet-lagged to go a concert starting at 8pm.

So, I looked around and Pittsburgh was the most workable place to go to, which means a ROAD TRIP!

We packed light (only one night) and after dropping Benji at camp and loading up on junk food at the dollar store, we hit the road. The drive was pretty easy, the surrounding view of New-York and Pennsylvania green and lush. Jacob watched shows on a phone most of the way...

Look at all this junk food!

Happy tripper

We stopped quickly at the Pennsylvania welcome centre and were quite impressed with all the things to do. We found an ad for a petting zoo that looked nice and was on the way.

We made good time and checked into our hotel, the Rivers Casino. Along the way we could already see tons of GnR fans setting up tailgate parties, which I have not seen before. It was really cool! People were BBQing, setting up lawn games, dressed up as Slash and playing music. It was all very heart warming and cool!

After a short nap we head out to the PNC Park, a baseball stadium where the concert was taking place. The streets around were not too crowded and getting there and inside was a breeze. We set up looking for merchandise (we planned on getting t-shirts) but for some reason only found tons of food. We finally came across a fan holding a bag of merch and asked her where she found it. The nice lady walked with us all the way down and around to the store, showing us how to get to our seats and being very kind!

Once we got our shirts and changed, we found our seats. It was still day time and the place was getting packed, with really good atmosphere.


Our seats were to the front right of the stage, but Jacob enjoyed the view from the bleachers better so we went back up which is where we were when the concert started. The volume was excessive and Jacob asked for his ear plugs and muffs right away!
:-)
(I put mine in as well. It actually sounded better through the ear plugs)

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"Earplugs Please!" :-)


We watched a few songs from the top, and then went for a snack when a few songs we didn't know were going on, after which we went back to our seats to see how the atmosphere was there. Everyone was standing of course and there was actually plenty of room (for a rock concert). We stayed there for a few and moved back up for the rest.

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GnR sounded pretty good. Axel unfortunately lost his high pitch and his energy, but is still very charismatic. Slash and Duff still look and sound great and the band was rocking it. It was a pretty straight forward rock concert. No pyrotechnics, not too much of a light show, just good music.

Before going, I poked a little with Jacob to figure out his interest. He always said he doesn't like live music and will probably only want to stay for a few songs. I was totally ready to leave whenever he wanted.
We ended up staying until 10am, about 20-21 songs! They always end with Paradise City, which we missed, but we did get to see many of our favourites.

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We walked the nice walk along the river back to the hotel and had a good sleep.

The morning after, we checked out after breakfast and headed to the petting zoo, about an hour away on the way home. It was the best petting zoo we've ever been to!
We had tons of goats to feed, which really liked nibbling on our shorts, shirts and shoe laces! They had lots of other animals too, from different types of cattle, to monkeys, zebras, etc. Lots of kangaroos for some reason. We took a picture with a baby Joy (a baby kangaroo is apparently called a joy), Jacob wanted to do the camel ride (which of course we did) and saw some prairie dogs too! We got a stuffy prairie dog (name Herbert) on the way out of course.

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The ride home was uneventful, and we made it home for about 7pm.

It was a wonderful quick road trip!