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Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Cheese fries, a concert and a lot of hours in the car.

Hello my friends. Sorry I haven’t been around so far this week. I’ve still been trying to finish up defensive driving for that silly ticket. And I didn’t have any time over the weekend to work on it.

“Why,” you ask?

Well, we were just a little busy going to concerts and eating crawfish. And believe me, concerts and crawfish take precedence over defensive driving any day of the week and twice on Saturday.

Literally.

I found out a while back that Casting Crowns would be in concert here in the DFW area (Grand Prairie to be exact) on Saturday, May 1st. Well, it just so happened that we also had two (that’s TWO, people) crawfish boils to go to that day. Sorry, Crowns, but you get beat out by crawfish hands down.

Then I realized that they would be in none other but my favorite college town, College Station, on the night before. Just imagine… a pilgrimage to College Station plus Casting Crowns. Well, my friends, that just equals awesome and WHOOP at the same time.

So I hopped on the Twitter and tweeted something about it to Mark Hall who I know sometimes gives out “Tweet & Greet” tickets. Low and behold, he still had some. After a phone call or two, we had my mom coming to keep the kids for Friday afternoon and night and we were off to the promised land.

Our trips down to Aggieland are always a little nostalgic as we don’t do it very often. So here were some of my thoughts from the road:

  • I am sad any time I have to pass through Hillsboro and not stop to shop.
  • We went through West. I wondered aloud if the Czech Stop is open all night for our long drive home.
  • As we got on Hwy 6, hubs and I noticed that it does, in fact, run both ways.
  • We always thought the town of Calvert’s high school mascot should be The Speed Trap.

Okay, now for the good stuff.

We got to College Station and had time for a quick snack. Where did we go? None other than the Chicken Oil Company for some cheese fries. It felt like home.

Chicken Oil

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Oh, and I totally got carded and Mike didn’t. He’s such a cradle robber. And I made him tip that sweet girl that took our order. A LOT.

We changed clothes in what might possibly be considered the smallest, most cramped, stuffiest bathroom on the face of the planet and then headed over to Reed Arena for the concert.

100_8077We turned around and could also see Kyle Field. *insert sigh of contentment here*

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So we got our tickets and met the group for the meet & greet and they led us back stage.

Now, if I had an official “Bucket List” one thing that would probably be on it would be to go back stage at a concert to meet the band. And since I don’t have one, if I ever do make one, I will likely put that on it just so I can mark it off. Just because I’m a little odd that way.

So here’s who we got to meet:

William and Caleb Chapman.

100_8080I have been hearing good things about these boys (listen to the old lady in me… boys. HA!). Their performance was really good. With it just being Caleb on acoustic guitar and William playing a little keyboard and drumming a little, their sounds was a little coffee-house-esque. Caleb even took a few minutes to talk about his sweet sister’s passing a few years ago and I pretty much teared up as I totally remember that day. He sang the song that he finished writing out of the grief of that terrible accident.

This is Mike Donehey from Tenth Avenue North. We met all the guys but it all moved so fast that we didn’t end up with a picture.

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These guys have an incredible sound. I’m a lover of some good rock music and that’s what they do/ but with some really incredible and deep lyrics. I think we’ll be hearing a lot from them in the years to come.

And finally we got to meet Casting Crowns.

Megan and Melodee. These ladies can sing. In case you didn’t know.

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This is Juan. He rocks the guitar and is married to Melodee (above) who also plays violin.

100_8086Here we are with the rest of the band: Brian, Mark, Chris and Hector.

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I think what I love about this group so much is the fact that they are just a bunch of people serving the Lord. They serve as youth pastors and leaders in their home churches in Atlanta and this seems to be kind of a side gig. And it seems to me that the Lord has truly blessed their ministries as they have been true to the calling He has on their lives.

The concert was incredible. This is Caleb.

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Precisely NONE of the rest of my “in concert” pictures came out. I think the bass was vibrating us too much because every single one of them was fuzzy.

Even my husband, who is not all that much of a music person, had a good time. If you’ve ever been to a Crowns concert before, you know that we went to church that night. Because as Mark Hall said, when the songs are over, they’re over. Jesus is the only thing that lasts.

Speaking of when the songs were over, the concert was over WAY later than we expected, so by then we were pretty hungry. We stopped at Wings N More for some heartburn before hitting the road for home at 11:30 pm. It truly did feel like we were back in college at that point.

And in case you were wondering, the Czech Stop is open for business, even at 2 am.

Czech Stop

We rolled in at the house at about 3 am at which time we decided that if we never listened to BBC radio at that hour again, it would be too soon. Try it some time. You’ll agree.

We then went through the whole next day of softball games and two crawfish boils on about 3 hours of sleep.

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Amen.

3 Comments:

Beckypdj said...

Love Casting Crowns. I saw them in concert about a year ago, very annointed. :) Sounds like you had a great trip.

Donna @ Way More Homemade said...

Becky - we did. We've been exhausted all week and I think I finally caught up on sleep Tuesday night after crashing at 8 pm. So worth it though.

We saw them a couple of years ago with some friends when they came to Dallas. I was as blown away then by their testimony and music as I am now.

ashley said...

how fun! wish i had been in town so that we could have met up! looks like fun!