ACL 2011

Hi friends!

Since I just started back blogging, I wanted to share about the most incredible experience Andrew and I had a couple of weekends ago...

ACL Music Fest is a music festival in Austin that takes place at Zilker Park. Zilker Park happenes to be 1 mile from my front door-which is pretty cool. So we live in a pretty great location for ACL. Well, ACL is pretty expensive. I think tickets for all 3 days were somewhere around $150.00. Which is really not all that expensive, but for Andrew and me-that's over $300.00 plus any food and drink costs (a beer was $7.00-and not special beer. Bud light...). So we had resolved that we weren't going to get to go this year. I was super bummed because one of the headliners was Coldplay. I have told Andrew that 3 bands I want to see most in concert are: U2 (saw them in Dallas in 2005), Dave Matthews Band (saw them at ACL in 2009) and Coldplay. They were going to be so close, I just HAD to see them. But alas, it wasn't in our budget. WELL, in June, one of my old youth kids turned great friend of mine, Christa Scholtz, told me she was coming for ACL and her dad would have two extra 3 day passes for me and Andrew! Woo-hoo! We were so excited. So when ACL acturally rolled around and Christa gave us our passes, she also had another special pass for us. It was an AMD pass. Now the AMD pass is kind of like gold. There are like 6 or so stages at ACL and of the 2 biggest stages where the headliners play, one of them is the AMD stage. With these passes, we could come and go in the private AMD area as we please. This private area has shaded areas, lots of seating, huge screens with live ACL shows streaming on them and the best part, free all you can drink tea, water, beer, wine and snow cones-and free meals catered by central market. It was heaven. But the BEST part was this-you can also get to the side stage of all of the shows on the AMD stage with these passes. But, if you have these:

Sweet Christa and I with our super sweet VIP passes!

you can go straight to the front of the line for back stage or side stage of the show!

These are the stairs leading to the side stage of the amd stage!!!

So Christa tells us we have side stage for Bright Eyes (I had never heard of them, but they are great), Iron and Wine, Ryan Bingham and best of all COLDPLAY! Here is a pic of what its like to be side stage for a show!

Here is my view of Coldplay. Yes, that is Chris Martin doing a backwards roll. Rock stars...

Anyway, backing up a bit to our first side stage experience was for Bright eyes and as we were up there we noticed that there was a camera crew filming someone. As we looked a bit longer, we realized it was CHRISTIAN BALE! Of course I screamed at him until he looked at me. Then we waved at each other. It was kind of a big deal. Whats even better is we saw him everyday and he and I exchanged waves all 3days. We are kind of friends...

Here is a stalker pic I took of Christian, my new buddy.

Anyway, back to our side stage Coldplay experience. We were literally RIGHT THERE for the whole show. Not only did I get to see the show, but when you are on the side stage, you feel like a PART of the show. Andrew and I were just so happy. Amazing that we got to walk to a music festival a mile from our house, amazing that we got free tickets, amazing we got VIP passes and free food and drinks, amazing that we got side stage, amazing we saw Christian Bale and Coldplay-but best- we got to experience all of this TOGETHER! That's the MOST amazing! We literally will tell our kids about this incredible experience!