the concert..that didn't happen...

what.a.nightmare. my 2 girl friends and i had tickets to see carolina liar, the fray and kelly clarkson (which we bought about 3 or 4 months ago) in toronto. the first band went on at 7 and the fray (who we really wanted to see) went on at 7:50. they asked me what time i thought we should leave and i said between 3:30 and 4, simply because of traffic. during non-rush hour traffic, it takes less than an hour to get into the city. i said i knew it was ridiculously early and we would be waiting, but it's better than sitting in traffic and being late. having lived there for 5 years, i know what traffic is like, even though i didn't have a car. well, my idea was a no-go and we left at about 5pm. surprisingly, traffic wasn't bad and we flew into the city in great time. it's once we got off the highway where the problems started.

at this point, it was about 6pm and we still had nearly 2 hours. what would normally take about 5 minutes, or less, to get to the venue off the highway, took over an hour. we passed 2 parking lots on the right with LOT FULL signs. after we inched ourselves along for an hour, we turned around and looked for parking on the other side. all the while, the traffic is still bumper to bumper. we passed another 2 parking lots on the right and yet again; LOT FULL. this all had to do with the ex that goes on every year (rides, food vendors, attractions etc) right across the street. we literally had NO WHERE TO PARK. obviously, parking further away and taking a cab wasn't an option either, and transit doesn't really go right down there. once traffic opened up, we said screw it, because the fray was already on for 25 minutes, and went and drowned our sorrows at a bar with sangria and nachos.

a little diagram above for visuals. point "B" is where we got off the highway, point "A" is where we made the turnaround and the red outlined star in the middle is where we needed to go. as you can see on the left, we made a 5km circle, one that would normally take approximately 6-12minutes. it took us 2 HOURS. we passed 4 full parking lots on our useless circle.

 sitting in traffic.

 super happy with our situation.

 at least toronto was pretty.

and the sangria was good.

while sitting in the car, i joked that i guess i was right, and we really should have left at 3:30/4, but i still don't think they took me seriously..

at least the tickets were only $33..but still, $33!!

oh, AND on the way home, we were stuck in traffic yet again at about 10:30pm. why? because police had found 'remains' on the highway and were investigating. it turned out to be a pig.

what a night.