I have been waiting for this day for over 2 years… the day concerts and live music were finally back!
And let me tell you I kicked off their return with a bang; by spending the entire weekend with an old high school teammate and seeing the legendary Garth Brooks, with 70,000 other people.
I haven’t seen 70,000 people combined the last 2 years, let alone in one place. And it was special.
The weekend started off with me traveling to Ocoee, which is a suburb outside of Orlando where I met up with my good friend Claire. After catching up and getting ready we got an Uber for downtown.
Downtown was filled with people pregaming for the concert. They had a stage with live music, the streets blocked off for drinking, and thousands of people equally as excited as I was that life was seeing some resemblance of the past.
After popping into a few restaurants to grab a table for dinner and drinks we ended up at this unique restaurant called Thrive. The food was very good, and the cocktails were top notch. We ended up splitting some sushi, Korean wings, and calamari while taking down a few margaritas. The atmosphere at Thrive along with the décor is very Instagram worthy so I would highly recommend this place for a girl’s night out if you are in the downtown Orlando area.
After dinner, we were about an hour to concert time and we needed to make our way over to Camping World Stadium which is a few miles walk from downtown. We couldn’t figure out where the shuttle service was so we kept walking and following the crowd. Unfortunately, we were not wearing the right shoes for a 2 mile walk, so we hailed down a biker to bike us over to the stadium, which was a fun and silly start to our evening.
Once we got to the stadium it was flooded with people, but surprisingly the security line took no time at all. Its great to see the improvements that have been made during the pandemic. However, the crowd was definitely felt in drink lines. They did not have enough people working the beer carts or concessions which seems to be a common theme when you go anywhere these days.
Thankfully, like any good concert it did not start on time so we had plenty of time to wait in a 45 minute long drink line before making it to our seats, which of course just like any event someone was sitting in. After some lady kicked these guys out of our seats we quickly made friends with the group around us. A pair of young moms also out for a girls night and a group of guys who we were convinced didn’t know who they were seeing by their lack of enthusiasm and singing along to all of Garth Brooks greatest hits.
After a 2.5 hour long concerts, Claire, myself, and our new found friends (the moms and guys in front of us; we confirmed they knew how to sing as they belted out Friends in Low Places at the end) made our way for a 2 mile walk to Saddle Up, a country bar in downtown. Where else would you go if it’s only 10:00pm and you just had the best night in 2 years?!
To say it was a night to remember is an understatement. We woke up the next morning extremely tired with swollen feet, but I wouldn’t trade a single mile or minute of the night.
Now its time to start jamming out to some Kenny Chesney as my next concert is less than a month away!!