Weekend of Rock!

I'm writing this now because I'm afraid I'll forget something! Anyways, I just got back last night from a two-day trip to Auckland city, which is a 1 hour flight north of Wellington. Our primary objective was to rock out to Guns N Roses at the Vector Arena, which we had purchased tickets to earlier in the year. The second objective was to do something extreme, like Sky Diving out of a plane at 12,000 feet. However, the weather conditions were unfavorable - rainy and windy, so we had to ditch that plan and had some other fun I'll describe in detail below...

The Vector Arena was a little sparse during the opening bands, which were still pretty good. Kevin recognized Sebastian Bach of Skid Row fame as the lead singer of one of the opening bands ("Angel Down"). He was entertaining as he was encouraging audience participation (he also said a lot of bad words). By the time Axel Rose and his GnR band showed up on stage, the audience was wild and crazy and there was a great positive atmosphere. I think Axel picked up on this and decided to give us one amazing show of rock! I heard the night before that Axel arrived late and left a little early in a huff for some odd reason.. maybe he was old and tired. It is a long flight from the States. Lucky for us, we had the Saturday concert tickets, and he rocked the house with his new band of guitarists. We were concerned initially that the concert wouldn't be that great because none of the original guitarists of Guns N Roses are still with the band, and that Axel's voice would be all low and not that good. Our concerns disappeared when we heard the new guitarists going into amazing solos and Axel's voice still sounding the same after 14 years or something. The concert lasted till 2 a.m. and we were all rocking out so hard that at the end of the night I slept like a baby.

Next morning, Martha gets a call from the skydiving place saying that it is cancelled (because of the rain and cloudy gloominess). We had breakfast and Kevin was contemplating catching an early flight home because it was rainy and pretty bleak-looking. Then I thought to myself... wait a minute, what's the best thing to do on a rainy day? Watch a movie. On IMAX. Now, let me think, what movie could we possibly see on IMAX (there are no imax theaters in Wellington)? That's right! TRANSFORMERS! It was stunning on the mega gigantic screen... saw so many more details of the transformations and I think I can remember how to draw the robots better now! Drew this one pretty quickly this morning on facebook's Graffitti wall application:

It was still loads of fun the second time around and some of the action sequences were even more breathtaking in large format.

So after the IMAX experience, we had some time to kill in the afternoon before dinner and flying home to Wellington. So, we decided to do the Sky Jump off of the Auckland Sky Tower. It's a 630 foot drop, but it's not exactly freefall... they basically hang you off of a wire and acclerate you down towards a target at 85 kph. It's pretty exhiliarating and the first jump off of the platform at the top is the scariest part. I got some cheesy photos and I'll scan those in when I get home from work tonight! It was definitely a great second to sky diving and rounded out the action-packed weekend quite nicely.

Auckland is a pretty fun city to visit, it reminded me of Boston a little, with taller buildings than Wellington and the surrounding harbors. Here's some of the pics from the trip. I'll try to upload some more videos of the concert later.