HI. YES. WE'RE STILL ALIVE.
Have you ever felt compelled to go and see your favourite
band as many times as you can on a tour they're doing of wherever you live?
Have you ever decided to actually make that happen no matter how much of a bad
idea it may be, or no matter how much you know you're going to regret it
afterwards for whatever reason? (Financial, health, sanity...)
Invading The Pit had a fun experience with this lately, and
not for the first time!
As you may or may not know, Avenged Sevenfold recently
toured Europe on their Hail to the King cycle. We are both huge fans of the
band and had been looking forward to seeing them live again for a long time.
Before they hit the UK leg of the tour, Leese had the
amazing opportunity of taking her little sister to her first A7X show ever in
Amsterdam, and great times were had by all. There was one incident of a
particularly annoying female becoming an enemy throughout the show, but she was
taken care of during Unholy Confessions...
Anyway!
The shows in Manchester and London were always going to
happen. There was never any doubt that we'd be attending these shows, but we
thought that would be it. Even though it was only two shows, we had a crazy
plan in place. We booked a hotel in London for two nights, and decided to head
off to London after the Manchester show and make the 200+ mile journey on zero
sleep at a silly time in the morning.
We arrived at our hotel at a time when most people were
waking up to begin their day... 7 AM. This didn't really give us much
opportunity to get any sleep, but that didn't matter because we had another
night of Avatar, Five Finger Death Punch and Avenged Sevenfold to look forward
to. Who needs sleep?
The two consecutive nights we'd spent at awesome shows left
us wanting more. There were only two shows left: Dublin and Birmingham. Dublin
was a definite no as neither of us would have been able to take the time off
work. Birmingham, however, presented some kind of possibility... with the
biggest problem being that the show had sold out.
Through sheer luck and perseverance we managed to score
three standing tickets for the show for £75 – Yes, less than face value. We
never thought THAT would happen.
Actually getting to Birmingham, though, was a massive
headache. It was on one of the days when the UK was being absolutely battered
by wind and rain and the country had pretty much come to a stop as far as
public transport was concerned. This made it difficult for us to meet up (as
Leese STILL doesn't drive) but we managed it through Joobs taking a little
detour to pick her up in Knutsford as opposed to Stafford.
Thanks to a lorry that broke down on the motorway, we
arrived at the show two hours after it started, missing our beloved Avatar, and
Rob Halford singing on stage with Five Finger Death Punch. To say we were
unhappy would be an understatement. We got there just as Avenged finished up
the first song.
It turned out to be a great show, though, of course.
Definitely worth the stress and anger of getting there. Afterwards, we spent 2
hours trying to get out of Birmingham because for some silly reason they close
the motorway at night.
Made it back to Joobs' house around 3-4 AM, slept a little
bit, and then Leese had an asthma attack running for the train to work a few
hours later and ended up in the hospital.
SACRIFICES, PEOPLE. IT'S WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT.
To some extent, anyway.
Stay tuned for a generic end of year post sometime soon...
