A bit of catching up to do.. long post…

We came back to Vegas to see Nine Inch Nails perform on Saturday night at Planet Hollywood. Those guys are absolutely incredible & it was great to see a gig finally with the full lightshow, not the scaled-down version that we’re used to seeing in Australasia. Check out some of these screen effects they had. I’ve never seen anything like it. Somehow the screens were interactive..

(As usual, hover over the images to see my explanations)

Also check out Nik’s Youtube profile to see his video footage. It really does pay to see the effects in action.

And then on Monday we went back to LA again, this time for another Jimmy Kimmel taping, The Cure were performing! & to help a friend move.

It was all a bit of a disaster really.

So we left Monday morning with plenty of time to get to Hollywood. We were given a heads up one of the roads may be closed due to snow between Vegas & LA. Still, we had heaps of time for a detour if needed.

We got to the outskirts of Vegas when already the weather started to show itself. Snow was falling! And falling hard. A blizzard even!

It looked amazing, here we were in the Nevada desert & it was covered in snow. Pretty thick too. It seemed out of place to see cacti & joshua trees lined with snow, but very beautiful.

So the roads slowed down considerably as the snow got thicker & a few accidents (luckily not us!) made traffic jams. As our speed decreased moreso in the dangerous conditions it was looking like we might actually be tight on time, not early in line for The Cure.

As we arrived in LA Nik looked up traffic info on his phone, the freeways were all displayed in red (meaning dense traffic, green meaning clear roads) & we had some crazy conditions still ahead. It was raining hard in LA & had been all day. There was flooding on the 10 freeway. I hate the 10, even at the best of times. It’s a bastard of a freeway.

We spent a couple of hours on this stretch of road that wouldn’t usually be anymore than half an hour. We crawled along at a snail’s pace for miles & miles. It was an absolute nightmare & my mood was flaming.

We didn’t make it to The Cure at the curtain call time but ran to the entrance very late to find the queue still there strangely. The gig was planned to be outdoors behind the El Capitan, but since it was wet weather they had moved it inside, in the foyeur which was only a quarter of the capacity. The queue was maybe 500 people long (I’ve heard mixed figures from sources) & everyone had been waiting all afternoon in freezing conditions to hopefully get in.

So we waited along with them, at the back of the queue with hopes to getting in (we had a ticket after all) for hours on the freezing sidewalk. It was unbearably cold & our feet were numb.

Why were we still waiting? The show should’ve been going by now? .. .. We didn’t know what was going on from up the back. We were blocks away from the theatre & the queue was rarely moving. So it was 10pm by the time we started inching closer & eventually we got close enough to see there was no queue at all at the front. The Cure were already playing inside, we could hear them! We were queuing for nothing. The organizers didn’t tell us what was going on at all. Really slack. They could’ve at least done a headcount & told the last 300/400 people in line to go home. There were some really sad faces. So approx 100 of us stayed around & stood on the sidewalk listening to the band from outside. They played maybe 6 songs? They sounded good & everyone on the pavement lightened up enough to dance & cheer, but still I couldn’t help but feel a little sour by the whole experience. We had driven almost 8 hours through blizzard & flood to get there for nothing.

The next morning we woke up horribly early to help a friend move his gear. His stuff had been ransacked by US customs as it arrived in the country & they left it scattered in a dock warehouse in Long Beach for our friends to collect. Very sad. Our belongings came the same way but luckily our boxes weren’t as damaged, a bit beaten up but nothing too major.

So we packed up the container truck & it drove up to Adelanto (just north of LA) where we started unpacking it again. Big job.

And now we’re back in Vegas again until we move to California.