It has been a beautiful day in Perth, glorious sunshine, a touch on the warm side at 37 degrees. My head is spinning from the 'double life' I've been leading for the past two days. That of wife and mother on a family holiday, uncomfortably juxtaposed with that of a Springsteen fan whose dreams of getting a close to the stage pit number have come true. Firstly, I am extremely shocked at my apparent success at achieving number 36 in line, despite the good planning and careful consideration that went into my decision making. I traveled across the country, with a plan in mind to make an effort for this one, it was clearly a good plan, and yet I remain stunned and somewhat stupified at what is about to happen tomorrow!
But to continue with the story thus far....
Our family holiday began with a late afternoon drive to Brisbane airport, followed by what I suppose ought to be called an uneventful and successful flight, although what stands out in my mind is the unprecendented level of distraction, vague and disorganisation on my part. I left all the nappies in the checked baggage!!! For a 5 hour flight at night this is absolute insanity. Luckily there were two toddlers on the plane and the couple beside me who clearly thought we were stark raving mad for the capacity to forget something as simple as the nappies were nice enough not to say so, and generously handed over one of their ample supply. So we survived the flight pretty well after that, I got to watch half a movie (The Butler), after starting 3 others without much success, while sitting perched on the edge of my seat while my very tall toddler stretched her little toes out behind my arse.
After landing things got weird. My hubby and I have travelled a reasonable amount together with children. We have some routines. Arriving in Perth changed it all, right from the beginning. We had a non-Bruce fan collecting hubby and children - I deposited them in the car and told them I'd see them soon, and myself was collected by Karen, a long time Bruce fan and local. I was suddenly ripped from the quite demanding familiarity of family travel into 'lone woman concert-going queue forming' mode. I think I spent the whole trip from the airport to the city in a daze of disorientated unfamiliarity at the sudden right turn my holiday took, before I'd even arrived at my hotel! Which is my reason for not getting a happy snap of the midnight moment (or 2 am for those of us still working on Qld time) when I received the nikko number on my hand of 36. This number apparently will get you up against the stage, provided you don't want to be in the middle. Apparently that is where the first 15 -25 people fit. This information is important I'm sure. Stunned I let the explanation wash over me, this was the beginning of the slow creeping of the hugeness of this number business.
And then I spent until 4 am Brisbane time, or later resettling tired but excited children, one by one into bed again before collapsing in a heap myself. To be woken only 3 or 4 hours later by one excited boy, ready to start his Western Australian adventure!
I did pretty well all day yesterday considering my sleep of less than 4 hours. A lot of quiet conversations with my children about holiday ettiquette (not hollering every little thing like we do at home for example). We found the shops to stock up on food. I scooted off to roll call on the way back, momentarily immersing in the world of Springsteen before a visit from a childhood friend, then suddenly another roll call! A long gap between 1pm and 8pm meant that we were able to spend some family time, but it went quickly between napping (baby and hubby, not me) and dinner. Suddenly there were 3 awake tired children (after a late afternoon play in the water fountain!) and I was again out the door to this 'Bruce thing'. That is how it was feeling at that point.
While the other fans wandered away in groups to have drinks and late dinners, I rushed back to take in hand the sleep situation for little folk. Grab a bite to eat and then finally blessed sleep.
Until 6am again. Today I was better prepared and the big kids went with hubby to the water fountain first thing, as well as a bit of other exploring in the city. Then I was trying to join them with the toddler, but suddenly it was roll call time, and my baby and I just rode a bus there and back again in the end - we got close to meeting up with the family, but had to turn around to come back to the Arena.
By which point I didn't care much about where I stood in the pit, as long as I got to do something that gave me an indication I was on the opposite side of the continent. I was impatient to 'holiday'.
A change to roll call times interfered with this, momentarily, but I rose to the challenge and between hubby and I we made new family plans between roll calls for the afternoon. We even got some schoolwork done!
Excited I left first for 2pm roll call, and even began to think about this 'front row' position thing a little bit. Enough to be scared of it! Or thoroughly alarmed at the proximity to Bruce and the band. And the length of time without a toilet break. Also there was a rumour about no water bottles. Which might sound like a good thing, given my other concern, but having a water bottle when a concert gets into its second hour without pause is about when taking small sips from a water bottle is necessary. I do not see a little cup of water lasting 2 hours plus in a pit full of excited fans. I see us all having dry throats and wet feet. Ha! that's my big prediction for tomorrow, right there.
Things seemed timed to perfection when hubby called me to tell me he was on the bus about to go past the arena! I quickly hopped on and our little family were on an adventure to the Museum.
We stopped to take a look at the recreated wetland area and frog habitat, and to play music in the amazing playground outside the museum entry. These were wonderful, impromptu family moments.
Inside the museum was one of those times of enduring the torture of having three children. It is glorious and insane. One was desperately unhappy with her inability to weave a spider's web (sounds funny when you read it, but you'll have to trust me it was not); another declared about 3 rooms of Western Australian History, Rocks and Minerals and bird life 'boring'; and then there was the showdown over the interactive educational game. We all survived, and amazingly even saw things. Just not very many! The highlights were watching the frogs be fed crickets, seeing a Mummified Tasmanian Tiger from the mainland over 4,000 years old and coming face to face with a taxidermied American Bison! Many other things may have been highlights, given the opportunity to see them! Given the chaos, I'm quite chuffed that we managed to salvage what we did!
A wardrobe emergency saw me return to the apartment with hot exhausted children while hubby shopped, followed by him BBQing our dinner while I cooked veggies. The moment he was done cooking outside though, it was roll call again! I rushed out before dinner and made it to the line. Then rushed back to get children tired out and to bed.
This was one of my favourite parts of the day. As they'd already eaten while I was gone, as soon as I cooled down a few degrees, we went out to explore. It was 7:15 and the free CAT buses had stopped, so we took a walk to the park across the street.
Expanses of green grass gave us an enjoyable shoes off run, the children found a challenging playground, I really enjoyed helping them conquer new equipment that stretched their physical limits and helped them overcome fears and uncertainties. The most generous gift from hubby today was 15 minutes mostly uninterrupted in this park so that I could do a set of Tai Chi. Usually on a Tuesday I do 2 two hour classes, so one set while away was a luxury. The weather was just gorgeous and the grass soft and ground flat. I felt the inner peace coming back.
We are geocachers from a long way back, so given a city park of this size we decided to look and see if we could find our first Western Australian cache while we were there. It was hilarious watching our eldest two children with the very bouncy inaccurate GPS walking in circles and cutting jagged corners trying to find this cache. Even more amusing was the loud and bumbling way all 5 of us stumbled across 3 innocent looking folk quite close. None cachers are called Muggles and we'd just run into some while two children are yelling about the cache and where it was! Lucky for us, they were not muggles and were kind enough to give the kids a few big hints about how to find it!!
We all had a terrific, relaxing time just hanging out together on that walk and it really set the tone for a relatively easy routine to get to bed, although I was still cutting it very fine running out the door at 9:40 with a phone charged to only 20%.
Tonight was my first non-queuing Bruce socialising with a quick drink across the road before the role call (I walked fast and the drink was imaginary!) Then another tiny bite of socialising afterwards and back to here I came, approaching the unit door to the sound of high pitched wailing from the littlest wanting her Mummy.
And there is still tomorrow to get through!!!
