Like Tom Sawyer, We Caravaned!

I think only my friend Justin might get the title above at first glance. For the rest of you, we went to see Rush...

...last Friday in Tampa, followed by Rush again in West Palm Beach on Saturday. Caravan is one of their newest songs (LOVE IT) and of course one of their classics is Tom Sawyer.

We left Savannah around 1:30 and made our way down to Tampa. Tampa is approximately 6 hours away and the show started at 7:30. Interestingly, we arrived at 6:30, parked and made it to our seats by 7:15. Lucky for us, the band was running behind, so we had plenty of time to grab some spectacularly expensive beer and find our seats.

The first night this is what we saw:

Pretty darn good seats...we were right under the pavilion and in perfect seating for beer gettin and bathroom goin!

This years Rush tour is called Time Machine. It. is. FABULOUS!

We saw the last two shows of the North American tour (originally the last two shows of the tour at all, but they booked some more shows down in South America).

Both shows were completely sold out. The Tampa show held 20,000 people. My only comment was "DAMN! Look at all these white people!" I have never seen so many white people at one time. Also, I would say 65% of them were men.

After 3 hours of blissful music listening, we decided to head to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino to see if we could win some money. When I say we, I just mean our friend Jeremy. He put in $1 in the nickel slots and won $100.00...in only about 10 minutes. I put $20.00 into the nickel slots and lost all $20.00 in about 5 minutes. We only stayed 30 minutes, as that is when we found out that the drinks on the floor were not free. No free drinks in a casino?!? What kind of world are we living in?!?

We continued our drinking at the hotel.

The next morning we arose to head the 3 hours or so to West Palm Beach. West Palm is quite beautiful!

Those are not Jesus' footprints.

The second night, this is what our seats looked like:

We tailgated before hand, which I have never done at a concert. Multiple times at football games and even a few times for the Savannah Derby Devils Roller Derby...

Jeremy, Justin and Krystal

My husband, Neil Peart, was, as usual, perfectly amazing on the drums. His drum solo this year, once again, put tears in my eyes.

I actually don't remember the end of the concert on the second night, but I can tell you two things: 1) me and rum drinks make for a very sloppy drunk 2) some woman got drug out from the audience after suffering an apparent heart attack. I didn't see anywhere in the paper where she died, so I am assuming they got her ticker back on track. Sorry you and I both missed the end of the show Ms. Lady.

The next day we lumbered out of bed and started making our way home. Jeremy is a HUGE Jimmy Buffett fan, so we stopped at Universal Studios where there is a Margaritaville. We then took a tour of what we could (without getting into the actual rides area) which mostly consisted of more restaurants and bars. So we had a few drinks at the bars and finally departed around 6:30pm.

It is Love Bug season in Florida. If you have never been to Florida during Love Bug season, then you probably didn't even make a face.

These are Love Bugs:

Can you guess why they are called that?!?

They swarm like those damn plagues that Moses was throwin Pharaoh's way back in the day. Good thing Pharoah didn't have cars back then. I know he would have been pimpin in a nice Lambo or something, but then his windshield would look like this:

Or perhaps he would have been all incognito and traveled the world as a trucker, then his truck would look like this:

Really, we totally saw some trucks JUST like this!

Thankfully, Florida realizes that their Love Bug mating season is quite out of hand and they have provided these AWESOME drive up winshield washer things. We did it the first time just for fun, but the second time was a necessity.

This is what it looked like for us:

But this is a much better idea of what it does:

Really, it is the small things in life.