I'm currently procrastinating studying for my midterm, and I also haven't written a blog in forever and a half, so I figured I'd tell you all the story of me going to Warped Tour this summer.
So I spent basically the entire summer at my boyfriend's house. He lives almost 6 hours away from me, so when I'm not in school I go there and work, and then come back home and go back to school. Now, my boyfriend (gonna call him Cam, which is his name, because I can't be bothered typing out 'my boyfriend' every time) has this thing where he's somehow friends with a lot of people in a lot of bands. I have no idea how he does it, he just starts talking to them and then suddenly they're best friends.
Mattie, the lead singer from For Today (before they broke up I guess) is his 'spiritual father', he plays video games with Matthew, lead singer from MyChildren MyBride, and Garrett, lead singer from Silent Planet is one of his best friends. That's by no means an extensive list, but just to give you an idea. It's weird, guys. I don't understand it.
ANYWAYS, we wanted to go to Warped last summer but Silent Planet was only playing the first half of the tour and we didn't really want to see any other bands, so we didn't. However, this year they started in Seattle, which is the easiest place for us to get to from our side of Canada, and Silent Planet was playing the whole tour, so we figured we'd go and see them play. The rest of the lineup didn't really appeal to either of us, but we wanted to road trip anyways and Cam wanted to see Garrett, so we went.
As it turns out, HeartSupport was also gonna be on the tour, and Cam's friend Nate is one of the dudes associated with the company. I have no idea what he actually does there, but I know he is one of the main point dudes with touring and stuff. So we were like cool, we'll get to hang out with Nate too, and Cam will get to see some friends who he never gets to actually hang out with and it'll be a good idea.
So we pack up all our shit and road trip the 14 hours it takes the get to Seattle. We stopped and saw some of my family on the way, and got to spend my great grandparents' 70th wedding anniversary with them, so that was really nice. It felt like it took forever to get to Seattle, but we finally did. We booked an Airbnb to stay in, because we were both pretty broke and it was cheap, so we were expecting this tiny little room in this run down area of Seattle, but oh boy were we wrong.
We ended up booking this place in Issaquah that was gorgeous. The house was gigantic, the lady who owned it was so nice, and it looked over this gorgeous park and you could see Bellevue and Seattle if you looked out to the horizon. It was amazing. Issaquah is also a really nice little place, I really enjoyed staying there.
We got to Seattle two days before the actual Warped date. The tour got to Seattle the day before it started, because it was the first day of the tour, so they had to set everything up and get everything all organized. Nate and Garrett wanted to meet for lunch or dinner, depending on when they were finished everything, so we figured we'd go downtown Seattle (where the venue was), go look around, and then meet them and grab something to eat.
Now, I don't know if anyone has driven in downtown Seattle, but as someone from a smallish town in Canada, it is absolute hell. I almost had multiple breakdowns, Cam and I were screaming at each other the whole time, and I swear I almost got into 25 accidents. I will never in my life drive there again. We had to drive down so many roads over and over because neither of us knew where we were going, and parking is expensive as fuck so we had to try and find somewhere to park that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg. Which we finally did, but it was sorta out of the way of downtown, so we had to do lots of walking. We wanted to see where the venue was, so we walked through downtown to go take a look and scope out any parking, and when we finally got close to the venue, we heard someone calling Cam.
So we turn around and Nate, his wife and the girl that was managing their tent were standing there. We just happened to randomly walk down the same road as them and run into them. It was super weird. So they took us in with them because they were trying to find all of their merch in the drop ship (the place where all of the merch for tents and bands goes), and as we were walking to go find everything, we hear another person call Cam, and we turn around to find Garrett just hanging out, trying to fix a tent issue.
So at this point I was like how are we finding everyone we know when this venue is gigantic as we're sitting there hanging out while band members and people who run Warped Tour are walking past us. We chatted with Garrett for a bit and then he had to go call some tent company because they had sent this bring pink tent instead of what the band ordered, so we continued on to go find the drop ship and figure out where the hell the merch had gone. The drop ship ended up being this gigantic warehouse room where literally all the band's merch was. People were in there trying to organize it, and we spent forever looking for HeartSupport's stuff, but we couldn't find it anywhere. So we just ended up walking all through the venue (well, the parking lot, in classic Warped Tour style) and looking everywhere we could think of. We had to jump in the back of huge truck trailers and look through stuff, look under all the tents people were trying to set up, and finally we found it under this random tent with a bunch of random band's stuff.
So we were trying to figure out what to do from there, when Nate says they have to go to the tent meeting that they do at the beginning of every Warped, and asks if we want to sit in on it with them. Since we had nothing else to do, we just casually slipped in and sat in while Kevin Lyman talked to all the people running tents, whether it was companies or non-profits, and then we went to the little non-profit meeting they had afterwards. It was actually really cool hearing all the stuff they have and can do.
We ended up just walking around Seattle after that was done, we went to Pike Place and at at this amazing little pizza place. Garrett met us for dinner, and brought his manager, Cory, who works for Solid State Records and it was so interesting getting to talk to him and ask him all about what managing bands is like. Once we finished dinner, we had to take Garrett to this really specific Walmart that was out of the city, and I made Nate drive because no way in hell was I driving all these people around when I couldn't function. Garrett ended up riding in the trunk of the car for a while because we didn't have enough seats. He made a tweet from inside the trunk. It was a good time.
The next day, the actual day of Warped, we had to try and find parking in the hell that is Seattle again and ended up parking in the same garage and walking again because there was no parking anywhere at all. As we were about to get to the venue, I heard someone call Cam FOR A THIRD TIME. We turn around and it's Thomas, from Silent Planet, and Jonathon, a photographer who usually goes on tour with them. So we chat with them for a while, and then went to go get our wristbands, because Garrett put us on the guest list, and we got the "no escort needed" ones, which meant we could literally go wherever. It was great.
We spent most of the time at SP's merch tent, which was right in front of the Monster stages, so we watched a lot of bands like Hundreth, Stick to Your Guns, and Fit for A King. When Silent Planet played we got to go "backstage", which was actually literally standing on the stage watching the band, and Garrett dedicated a song to us. It was really sweet.
I also saw American Authors, because they were the only other band that I really wanted to see, so that was cool. We hung out at the HeartSupport table, back in Silent Planet's van, and just walked around and checked everything out.
Once the day was done, we helped SP tear down their merch tent and load everything up, and then went for dinner with some of the Silent Planet guys, Cory, and the dudes from Fit for A King. Garrett bought us dinner because we were broke as hell and the place was expensive so that was really nice of him.
It was such a bizarre couple days, but it was so much fun.
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