Coming home: The Black Keys

We spent wednesday lounging around the house, relaxing, reading, and doing Lego.

We packed up most of the house on the thursday morning, and were still able to make it on the road by 9am.  We had already decided to take the coast road, I95, home as we did not think it would be too busy.  Other than a bit of traffic around the major cities, we were right.  Paul managed to do the first 200 miles while listening to the cricket through his phone.

Note the headphones

We stopped for an early lunch just after Jacksonville, and I took over the driving.  I got us all the way past Savannah before tunnel vision started to set in and we had to swap over again.  Paul did the next stint, and I took over about 80 miles from home.  The weather was appalling once we got on the I26, and it has remained so since we got home.  We arrived back in Simpsonville just before 6pm, so we made really good time.

Friday was spent relaxing, recovering and eagerly awaiting our night out.  Way back in February, we booked tickets to go and see The Black Keys at the Charter Amphitheater in Simpsonville.  We watched a storm come over at about 4.30, and the rain chucked down.  The thunder was almost continuos, and the lightning just kept on coming.  We wondered if it would even be on.  Our wonderful friend Anna arrived at 7pm, to babysit the boys. We got the younger 2 in bed, and headed off.  I had originally planned to park our car at a good friends house, she lives on a subdivision right near the amphitheater.  We headed the back roads, as traffic around the area can be notoriously bad if there is an event on.  We drove by the back entrance, and noticed it was open with parking available, so we went for it.  I text my friend to offer my apologies for messing her around.  We paid our parking, and got parked near the side of the amphitheater.  It was very muddy, but at least not raining.  We walked down to an entrance we had seen that was not as busy, but the place was a mad house.  It took us a good 25 minutes to queue up and get in, not what you want after doing a whole load of theme parks, followed by a 500 mile drive.

Finally in!

We made it in, got a beer each ($9, probably quite reasonable for an event) and had a little squelch around.  We settled on an area about half way down and just off the aisle.  The support act were the Flaming Lips.  I know very little about this band, other than Edith Bowman used to big them up all the time on Radio 1.  They were quite good, not my cup of tea, but certainly Pauls.  Just before the set ended, we headed up for more beer.  We were served by a delightful gent from Greenville Rugby Club, who picked up on our accents straight away.  We headed back down, to await the headliners.

When  I first told my friends here I had booked these tickets the majority of the responses were "who are the Black Keys?" Well, they won 4 Grammy's this year.  We only got into them just before we left the UK, but still do not have their fill back catalogue yet.  What we heard at the concert though, we really loved.  They played a lot from the album we have, and a whole heap more that we have never heard. They were very good.  It has been a long time since we saw a concert (think it was Reading Festival, 2004!!!), but this was good.  They were tight, rocky, eager and very good!  They finished playing just after 11pm, but came back for an encore, which was awesome.  We both really enjoyed the concert.

The Black Keys

The people watching was almost as much fun.  You had  the dressed up girls, looking like they were going clubbing, to the rednecks standing down wind from us smoking a very suspicious smelling substance, to the college gang with a German with them in front, very entertaining.  After the encore we headed back to the car.

We were able to get out of the venue in about 20 minutes, which I though was very reasonable given the amount of people.  We had a slight delay in our journey home, due to a car being in a ditch down the back road, but the fire brigade seemed to have it all under control.  We made it home just after midnight, gave Anna a bottle of wine as a thank you, and headed straight in the show to wash our muddy feet (they truly were disgusting, I wish I owned a pair of wellies)

Here is a link to one of The Black Keys well known songs


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yCIDkFI7ew