Prologue – Word of warning to the faint of heart (or slow readers) – As my friend Alex Simmons (only the 3rd most important Alex in this tale, as you will soon see) once said, “With Becky (my wife), it’s just the facts, but Pete never let’s the facts get the way of a good story.” With that in mind, push on hardy reader if you dare:
So here we are again. After a summer off, I'm resurrecting the old family blog. After back-to-back Griswald-type adventures in '07 & '08, last year's Disneyland and camping trips just didn't quite seem blog worthy. While this two-week tour of Western states still seems tame compared to a 6 1/2 week cross-country gamble in a 17-year-old motor home or a month of Europe on a budget, we still have family members that want to keep tabs on us so we'll try this yet again.
Let me introduce you to the entire cast (for anyone who may not know). The cute but thinks-she’s-fifteen-years old four-year old will be played by Katie. The mellow go-with-the-flow nine-year-old brother sandwiched in between two high-energy sisters will be played by Zac. The part of the protagonist as instigator of this year’s adventures will be given to eleven-year old Alex (aka Alexandra or Weird Alex). The best supporting actress nomination will have to be given to my good-natured wife Becky although her too frequent eye rolling at me might make her lose out on the Oscar to Kathy Bates. And I, Pete the Jovial, will play the role of planner, navigator and scribe to this whole messy affair.
Anyway, as many of you probably know, our 11-year old daughter is a HUGE Weird Al Yankovic fan. It probably started as a wanting-something-you-can’t-have thing because Becky and I took my brother Paul and our niece Tansy to a Weird Al concert in Reno about ten years ago. Alex was around a year old and we left her with a friend in Reno while we went to the show.
Fast-forward a handful of years – Becky and I have always been casual Weird Al fans. We owned a couple of his CDs (not to mention the old cassette tapes from our younger years), and as I mentioned we had attended one concert. Well, a couple of years back now, we introduced our daughter Alex to Weird Al’s music. She immediately loved it, and began begging to use our computer to watch every Weird Al video she could find on YouTube.
We knew he had been at the State Fair in Sacramento before and hoped to take her last summer. Alas, it was not meant to be though. Weird Al had finished his Straight Outta Lynwood tour and took the summer of 2009 off from touring. Alex was disappointed, and I vowed in my Grinch-sized heart to get her tickets to his next concert anywhere west of the Mississippi.
In the meantime, Alex’s infatuation with Weird Al continued to grow. Thanks to the Internet she now has several Weird Al shirts that she sports at school, and she signed her name “Weird Alex” in her classmates’ yearbooks at the end of the year. As soon as Santa (before he went crazy) brought her an iPod for Christmas, she began filling it with every Weird Al song and music video she could download. Her 11th birthday was a Weird Al-themed party and included a sixteen-girl dance party (along with a few younger siblings) rocking out to a Weird Al music video DVD that she had been given. She has begun writing her own lyrics to songs she hears, and she tells people that when she grows up, she wants to be a parody writer. How many fifth graders even know what that is?
As her dutiful father, I kept checking Weird Al’s web site and saw that an upcoming tour was in the works. The first concert announced was Costa Mesa on August 13th – in southern California. I didn’t get tickets immediately because I wanted to wait and see if there would be one closer to us. However, with her birthday coming up in February I bought tickets to the Costa Mesa concert and decided we’d plan our summer vacation around the concert. Alex actually became a little teary-eyed with happiness when she opened the tickets along with an orange Weird Al shirt. You should have seen her face. Oh wait, you can – I’ll include a picture with this post.
Anyway, once the rest of the tour was announced, we saw that he was coming to Sacramento (near us) on July 30 so we planned to go to that concert as well, but then the date changed to August 1. Since the new concert was on Sunday, we made the only obvious choice – we decided to drive 8 hours to Redmond, Oregon to see Al there the night before.
We had planned to visit my dad on the Oregon coast (a mere 4 hour drive from Redmond) this summer anyway. With the two concerts as bookends of our summer of Al, we filled in the two-weeks gap with a planned road trip tour of six Western states. We will be visiting family, friends and fun along the way. And when it’s all over, we’ll end our last night of the trip exactly where we started our first night – at a Weird Al concert.
LONG LIVE AL!
