Chapter 1: Disappointment

It was going to be the perfect weekend. 

We drove from North Ogden to St. George, settling for an overnighter before waking up alongside the morning horizon to drive through canyons and valleys into Las Vegas in time for doors opening at the inaugural When We Were Young festival.

Heather had pre-ordered a pink shirt with a skeleton hand in a rock-out position. 

I had an Excel sheet of the hours, bands, and stages for our 12-hour concert experience.

Headlined by My Chemical Romance and Avril Lavigne, the festival was bringing back the Warped Tour style of a rockfest with multiple stages and bands rotating in and out all day. There would be The All-American Rejects, Paramore, The Ready Set, We The Kings, and much more. As soon as tickets were released, they were purchased and plans were made. Kids would stay with babysitters. Jobs would use PTO. Money for hotel reservations and gas would be saved up. 

It was going to be the perfect weekend. 

We pulled into the parking garage of Circus, Circus with about thirty minutes until those gates would open. Driving the garage, something freaked us out (different story, ask me in person), and that sent the Senses Failing (get it?). Pulling the Nissan Pathfinder in between the two white lines, the car stopped, and I unbuckled my seatbelt, opened my car door, and reached in my pocket for my phone all relatively simultaneously. 

Cancelled. 

Just minutes ago, Day One had been officially canceled due to terribly dangerous high winds the area was beginning to experience and would soon escalate worse. With a forecast for high winds, the festival had anticipated the weather challenges and tried to make magic happen. Instead, 60 mph gusts of wind were expected to take down power lines, let alone high-strung festival lights and speakers. 

“Under the advisement of the National Weather Service and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, we have no other choice than to cancel today’s When We Were Young Festival. The safety of our fans, artists, and staff will always be our top priority.”

Unable to check into our hotel room yet and isolated in a parking garage (and dealing with the freakout previously mentioned), we frantically sprawled into the social media universe looking for clues, ideas, solutions, or just a community to vent with. The service was low, so we took to the streets and found the high winds. Retreating back to the Pathfinder, we discovered the side mirror was busted and the exterior rear car door dented.

What was happening?

Eventually, we did get into the hotel lobby and tried to cancel our reservation to head back home. We were too late, could we reschedule it? Call Expedia. On hold. For an hour.  What about getting tickets for day two? Tomorrow, Sunday, the festival would repeat for deja vu. We’re here, might as well. We’ll get refunded for these tickets, so let’s add another day? Tickets tripled in price, over $1000 for each general admission piece of parchment on the resell market. Day three, the finale, would be the following Sunday. Could we? A lady in the same situation as us came from New York. She “had no choice,” she said and splurged for a $1,200 ticket to get in the next day. 

Us? Well, we brewed and stewed. Everything was dumb – the wind was dumb, the festival was dumb, canceling was dumb, the drive was dumb, paying for the trip was dumb, and trying to do something fun was dumb. It was all dumb and we were the most dumb. I was short with Heather and she was short with me. We were pissed together, sometimes at each other. We checked into our room and lay on opposite beds just mad at the world and staring at phones. I took a walk, threw some dollars into Blackjack, and repeated woe is me like it was all I knew. I know depression, and this wasn’t the first time depression came into the gut of having the one thing you were looking forward to become a bust.

Time slowly passed like that and, granted, the winds were strong. We couldn’t just walk the strip and it was also the middle of the day so where should we go? We thought of going to a movie, got in the car to drive around, skipped an exit, caught some traffic, and pulled into the theatre to pull back out since we missed the timing.

News and tweets were starting to brew together a schedule for the evening, as many bands felt bad about abandoning the day one crowd. A bowling alley here, a nightclub there, bands were connecting to their base to do a small show or an acoustic piece. Fittingly, the wind was dying and the outside atmosphere was fine.

For us, we found out that All-American was going to play at Soul Belly BBQ after closing, trying to make peace with fans like us who were bummed and lost. The bar had a certain capacity, so attendance would be limited but we finally mustered some energy to give this side-show a shot. We could get some food while we’re out and maybe have a dose of fun to salvage the situation. 

FREE Rejects show TONIGHT. 9pm
@ Soul Belly BBQ
1327 S Main St
Las Vegas, NV 89104
United States

— THE ALL-AMERICAN REJECTS (@therejects) October 22, 2022

Despite a mic check three hours away, we decided to head for the ever-increasing line. We had heard about a sideshow for The Ready Set earlier in the day, on Fremont Street, but didn’t give ourselves the right amount of window. We drove to a Karaoke Bar, just in time to watch police shut it down after it surpassed capacity and got a bit too rowdy. If we are going to get this, for the Rejects, we are going to commit and get there early. Let’s do it, we vowed.

After tucking the Pathfinder away to avoid further damage (plus, missed exits and parking), we started funding the Uber business with all our trips to the grand ideas. We still had time for the Rejects line, so let’s walk a mile to the Soul Belly while it’s still daylight. We can do the Uber on our way home. Cool idea until we were lost outside a tattoo parlor on the wrong side of the freeway and called an Uber to drive us, literally (and I don’t use that word lightly) a half-block.

Upon arriving early for our Rejects sideshow, we found the line went around the building and the block and the street, but we took our place. A while later, we heard the number that would be allowed in. I took a walk and found where the line began and started to count. 

We weren’t even close. Like, 1,000 people in front of us, so not even close to close.

We could take another Uber and get across town again, as we were shuffling back and forth and back again in our quest to Viva Las Vegas. Admittedly, we just weren’t very good at planning on the fly in Sin City when we rarely do much sinning.

So we settled for comfort and security and bought last-minute tickets to watch David Copperfield do some magic. It was fine but we weren’t really in the mood still, plus we were spending money to just spend money and do things in Vegas just to do things in Vegas and it was all so disheartening. 

(He did conjure a puppet alien that said some questionable things and then summoned his spaceship into our auditorium. So. Yeah.)

And then we went to bed too late and woke up too early and started ticking off miles into the 461 distance from us and home. Did we dare listen to the playlist we had made for the occasion? Did we dare talk about our feelings? Welcoming us would be those cute kids, the demands of laundry and post-vacation life, alongside waking up another day later to get back into work mode. 

“How was it?” everyone would ask. “How was your getaway and the weekend?” Or maybe, “Was the festival so awesome? Sunday’s show looked legit!”

“Wait, you guys were for Saturday?”

“Oh.”

It was going to be the perfect weekend.