Dawn and Kevin

The day had finally arrived, our 30th Pearl Jam show, the impetus behind our trip to Ireland and England, was here. We very quickly got ready as we had packed up our bags the night before and checked out of the hotel. Our train was leaving King’s Cross at 9:30 a.m., and we had allowed plenty of time for the Tube ride there.  Unfortunately, we didn’t take into consideration that we were traveling during rush hour with heavy baggage.  A cab ride would have been a lot less stressful since the Underground was terribly crowded and getting onto a train with our luggage was not fun, but we did so successfully and made it to the rail station with plenty of time to spare.

Our platform was announced shortly before departure time, and we made our way onto our coach, on which we had reserved seats in advance for ease. We stowed our bags and walked down the aisle to our reserved table and our friend Kelly was already on board.  Both Kevin and I had gotten a pair of tickets to the show through TenClub, so we had a pair to sell.  I offered them up to some friends, and Kelly decided that she would take one (the other from our extra pair went to another friend who lives in England)  Kelly arranged to be on the same train to Leeds with us as well as to stay at the same hotel. We settled in for the 2 hour 15 minute ride and chatted pretty much incessantly.

We were staying at the Marriott, which was less than a 4 minute walk from the train station.  We arrived there shortly before 12:30 and were very pleased to learn that our room was ready. After checking in and getting settled, we met Kelly in the lobby and walked around town, looking for somewhere to have lunch.  We found a great authentic pub not far from us and enjoyed a satisfying lunch and pint before making our way over to the venue to check out the merch line. Unfortunately, the closer we got to the venue, the harder the rain started to fall…

Pearl Jam merch lines are notorious for being incredibly long, some people waited more than 5 hours in line at the Wrigley show, but this line was not quite that bad.  It took us about an hour of waiting to get to the front of the line during what was one of the most miserable, windy, cold downpours – so awful that we very nearly gave up.  But we persevered against the elements and were able to purchase the merchandise that we wanted. We then went to wait under cover until 4 pm when the fan club window was to open and we could pick up our tickets.  As the rain kept falling and we were getting colder and colder, we noticed just how long the line was for the tickets and changed our plans.  Instead of waiting for the ticket window to open, we grabbed a cab back to the hotel to dry off and planned to head back to the arena a bit later to claim our tix and get in the GA queue.

We arrived back at the venue shortly after 6p.m.  Even though the TenClub ticket will call line was handled poorly, we were inside the arena a little after 7p.m. which meant we only had about a 1 hour wait until the show was to start.