An Excuse to Drive 1000 Miles in a Lotus Elise!
My wife is a U2 fan and travels to great lengths to see the band perform. I look for any excuse to drive the Lotus Elise. What better excuse than to travel 500 miles down to San Diego, California and back in order to attend the opening night concert?
We left the kids in my daughter's capable charge and headed south on Sunday, the day before the concert. We stopped in San Luis Obispo for dinner, where Lynne graduated from the university and spent the night a bit further south. The next day we traveled the rest of the way to San Diego.
Lynne visited some of her fellow fans who were waiting in line for the concernt. We managed to catch Joshua Tree, a tribute band playing on a flatbed truck in the Tower Record parking lot across from the venue. Finally we attended the concert. Even I, a tag along kinda guy, thought the concert was great. It was clearly the first one and some of the songs needed definite work. But when they were doing well, it was amazing.
We traveled home the next day. At about Santa Barbara, Lynne got a call from a friend indicating The Traders' Den was down. Apparently someone had prepared a bit torrent of the first concert and published it on her music sharing site! Too many people wanted and the poor little server could not cope. The bottom two pictures are Lynne trying to bring back the site, sitting beside the road in the middle of nowhere and using only a cell phone.
The manditory picture of the Elise is at the same location. Lynne described the Elise as cozy, even if a bit noisy. I tried hard not to elbow her as I attached my seat belt. She mentioned the Elise has less room than the Seven did!
(My apologies for the poor quality of the photographs. They were taken with a Nikon Coolpix 2000 point-and-shoot camera, no lens and no ability to set the exposure or speed. Most were taken with the flash turned on to force a 1/60th speed, and my fingers over the flash so as not to blind anyone. Some post processing was done, auto levels and unsharpen mask.)
On the way home, Lynne got a call about her website, The Traders Den, crashing and needed to stop and get things fixed. This was the only time I took pictures as I was having too much fun driving.
