The night before my birthday we cashed in a Christmas pressie from our Ma – Our Jenny – tickets to see a concert at the Red Rock Amphitheatre in Denver, Colorado.  I have to admit I hadn’t heard about this place until Jodie mentioned it to me, but apparently it’s one of the most famous venues in the world and I’ve since learned that visiting it is one many people’s bucket lists.  Well this would have to be one of my trip highlights.  It was amazing.  Even if we weren’t seeing an act, just visiting it would have been amazing.

We got there as the doors opened to make the most of the atmosphere.  It started out empty, but as the evening progressed, it filled to capacity.  These were our seats – Row 54 right in the centre.  We were a fair way away from the stage, but there was a big screen which helped and from back here, we could take in all the antics of the people in front.

Fascinating people watching!

And check out this view back to Denver!!!!

This is the rock to the other side…

The first to play were Mama Kin Spender.  Mama Kin is married to John Butler, but plays in her own duo with her lifelong friend Thomas.  They were awesome.

Mama Kin played the drums backwards standing up!  I’m not up to date with current music – my taste is still stuck in the 60s, 70s and 80s (I can thanks Me Jenny and Me Colin’s record collection for that – I just never seemed to move on)… anyway, Me Sister is a lot more on the ball with stuff like that, so she had seen Mama Kin play in Melbourne and talked her up big time… and I wasn’t disappointed.

Then next to pay was this amazing 22 year old lady Tash Sultana.  She was incredible!  She plays 20 instruments and layers her music using a continuous loop machine… so she’s a one person band and watching her is mesmerizing.  She get’s right into it, taking the crowd along with her.   Even if some of her music wasn’t to my very specific taste, I couldn’t help but appreciate how talented she is.

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Then as it got darker the lights started appearing in the distance.  The temp during the day had been about 36 degrees, so an evening up here was just perfect.

Then Tash finished her set and we waited….. About half an hour later a first nations chap came on stage to do what we would know as a “welcome to country” and it was so moving.  He asked everybody to put one hand over the heart and their other hand on the should of the person sitting next to them (luckily we had nobody on either side of us at that stage!) and then he spoke.  He was inspired and uplifting, encouraging people to work together to make the world a better place.  People were really getting into it and he finished by chanting a prayer… the crowd went wild.  Then we waited…….and waited.

The crowd was getting more and more intoxicated and as we know Mary Juana is legal here in the state of Colorado, even though it’s illegal to smoke it in public, but apparently there are quite lax regulations and policing at music concerts so there was a distinct continual waft…. as well as some people behind us smoking ciggies! Honestly people!

So after waiting some more we decided that we’d move down to the front and if they hadn’t started playing by then, they would miss out on our company.  On closer inspection, we thought that there was perhaps a technical hitch because there seemed to be a lot of people milling around the technical equipment and there was still no band on the stage.

So we decided to head home.

Our initial plan was to catch an Uber home, so we ordered one and they were going to be 5 minutes away… then as Ricardo in his Toyota Camry approached, I was suddenly dumped and moved onto Liz in her transit van who was 17 minutes away…. and not moving any closer.  So we decided to get a cab – our cab driver used to be an Uber driver and he told us that there was a carpark full of Uber drivers, but they were all waiting until the concert had finished, when more people would be ordering Ubers at the one time – pushing the demand up, pushing the price up!  Sneaky! Rude!

It was a fabulous night at an amazing venue seeing a coupe of incredible artists with me beautiful sister…. who could ask for anything more on their birthday eve?