January 29: Dave!

This weekend, Mary Frances and I road tripped to Athens to see the one and only wonderful Dave Barnes.

However, we were not smart enough to buy tickets in advance online, so when we looked at the tour website Saturday morning in a UGA dorm room and saw the words "Sold Out," we almost had a heart attack.  All day long we were praying that there would be some way we could get the door guy to let us in, and we had 3 or 4 different plans for the evening that were combinations of checking the door and eating there or eating out with friends or begging people to let us in just to see Dave at 10.  

At 6, the doors opened and we headed over to the venue just to see what was going on.  The whole time we were standing in line we watched girls getting turned away and stared at the glaring SOLD OUT sign on the door.  When we got the the front of the line, the bouncer told us there was a 4% chance that we could possibly get a ticket that someone didn't pick up if we came back after the show had already started.  

Then, our miracle happened.  As we walked outside, I outbursted to the line, "Is anyone by any chance selling a ticket?!"  And then a girl sold us an extra she had. Simple as that.  After about 10 more minutes of asking people in line, the bouncer came out and offered us another ticket for $20 cash.  And there we were, only 30 minutes after the doors opened with tickets that we had watched other people walk away without.  Maybe buying tickets outside a concert doesn't sound much like a miracle, but we were so hopeless and so desperate that you would've thought we'd found a golden ticket in a Wonka bar by the way we were jumping up and down as the bouncer was putting on our wrist bands. 

After getting in we had an awesome dinner in this cool little venue, and then since we'd been there since 2 and a half hours before the show started, we ended up on front row to see Gabriel Kelley, Andrew Ripp (whose set list we got off the stage and autograph/picture we got after), and finally Dave Barnes who was hysterical and so amazing!! And so all the way around we concluded the night was a complete gift from God that we wouldn't have traded for anything!