What a random weekend!
Friday night, Jay noticed that the Barenaked Ladies posted this tweet:
This is a quick one twitterverse- ticket giveaway for London, ON show tomorrow night. Coming up in 10 minutes…
9:37 PM Apr 16th via TweetDeck
Followed by:
First 4 people to respond to this with #BnLLondon gets a pair of tix. Remember, you have 5 mins to reply to the DM sent to u if you won
9:46 PM Apr 16th via TweetDeck
Jay responded accordingly. He was the third person to answer and won the tickets! Slight problem though: the concert was in London, Ontario – a town seven hours away. It was also less than 24 hours away.
We checked the train schedule. There’d only be one train that would get us there on time to see the concert, and it would leave at 6:45AM. Since that meant we had to be up by 4AM to be able to bus to the train yard on time, we decided to skip over pesky sleeping. By this point, it was already midnight.
We got up at four and headed towards the train station. I was reminded of how pleasant it is to take the train. It took only a few minutes to obtain the tickets and board. The staff were courteous and genuinely appeared to enjoy their job.
For the Toronto-London leg of the trip, we sat at a group of four seats at the back of the cab that faced a table. We sat across from a man who was drunk off of mouthwash. He was listening to music on headphones, hitting the wall to the beats, occasionally sharing undecipherable lyrics to the world and throwing empty packs of cigarettes at me.
London is such a nice city. It has half the population of Ottawa, but it feels much more substantial. It’s clean and the drivers are nicer than the ones here.
Jay thought this comment was funny:
Hotelier: So you’ll have a room with two queens?
Me: Yes, but I’d like it to have one bed.
I was oblivious. Anywho, we went to pick up the tickets. They weren’t ready, but the kind girl at the box office agreed to call us when they would come in. We walked around, she called, and we got our tix.
The concert itself was great. First up was Joel Plaskett. These guys delivered a class act. They won a Juno the night of the show!
Next up was the Barenaked Ladies. These guys were the cherry on top. To be honest, I’m not a big fan of their music. The live performance, however, was just bloody fantastic. I can’t speak highly enough of their show, and this ranks among the best concerts I’ve ever seen.
The trip back the following day was interesting. The train lost power and stopped. The lights in our cab started to flicker, and then turned off. Then those of the cab in front started to flicker, and turned off. Meanwhile, the train still had wifi + a satellite connection, so we were able to watch the hockey game live off of a pirated stream while the engineers were running around.
The fun was short lasted, and the satcom died. The train was pitch black. In the end, we would arrive two hours later than scheduled. My friend, JT Alfons author of Surrogate Stars, gave me a lift back to my place, which was much appreciated.
Comments
2 responses to “Impromptu Weekend & BNL Goodness”
Thanks for the unsolicited plug! Your service will not be forgotten when Surrogate Stars hits a bookstore near you!
On a related note, I was reading over my manuscript today and one of the passages I had written made me cry. It’s that kind of emotional journey only found within the pages of Surrogate Stars, the novel of which I, J.T. Alfons, am the author.
It sounds like you had a cool trip…and who’d have ever thought you could actually win stuff on Twitter?!?! I’ll have to pay more attention to those “retweet to win” things…especially if there is a remote chance that I could win a copy of Surrogate Stars by JT Alfons.
Speaking of which, it’s just too bad you didn’t have a copy of Surrogate Stars by JT Alfons to read when the train broke down. I bet that’d have made the trip that much better, especially considering the certain awesomeness it contains.