Rose Bowl a nightmare of a venue

So last Sunday at this time, I was nearly to Pasadena in anticipation of the U2 concert at the Rose Bowl. I have never before traveled to a concert that required me to drive five hours one way and rent a room for the night. In fact, I am really not much of a concert person - except for when it comes to U2.

The boys from Ireland really played a little bit of a trick on all of us from the Bay Area. Tickets went on sale for the North American tour last spring and there were no tour dates in Northern California. The closest options where the Rose Bowl in Pasadena or Vegas. Most of the die-hard fans I know opted for one or the other. I chose the Rose Bowl because I figured it would require one day off work and one room in a hotel - saving time and money.

Like I mentioned last week, I did not really think about the Rose Bowl as the venue, or the logistical issues created by it. Partly this is because I've never been to a real football stadium, and partly because I was blinded by a need to see U2 live, no matter what the challenges. If only I had known that the Monday I'd arrive back at home from the concert that an e-mail would be waiting for me from U2.com to announce an additional leg of the tour in North America next spring - with a concert scheduled at Oakland Coliseum.

Of course, the tour promoters obviously did this on purpose to get people to go to the Rose Bowl for a concert that broke attendance records for both the band and the venue, and was broadcast live on YouTube, and was filmed for a concert DVD.

If I'd known about the Oakland show, I certainly wouldn't have gone to the Rose Bowl. The experience was an interesting one to say the least. The concert was great and it was pretty amazing to see close to 100,000 U2 fans all in the same place. A U2 concert is kinda like a grab bag, too, since you never know who the opening act is going to be almost until the concert begins. I didn't know Black-Eyed Peas were opening until we were waiting in line to get into the stadium a couple hours before the concert was set to start and the announcement come over the loudspeakers. Through the years I've seen a few opening acts at U2 concerts. I've seen Kings of Leon and Damian Marley, whose performances I didn't really enjoy. But I've also seemed No Doubt and now the Peas, who both put on great opening shows.

Everything inside the stadium was great but it was everything outside that was a nightmare. We got down to Pasadena around noon, checked into our hotel and with my sister's g-phone got directions to the shuttle stop for which we had purchased tickets. The shuttle was 1.1 miles from the hotel so we opted to leave the car behind and walk to Old Town Pasadena for lunch before heading to the shuttle. Though it was late October, temperatures in Pasadena were about 89 degrees, and every restaurant had long waits. We ended up at an Italian restaurant I'd tried before with a 30 minute wait for a table. By the time lunch was over we headed to the shuttle stop. There were signs from the shuttle station saying the Rose Bowl was a 1.5 mile walk away, but we had our tickets secured so we lined up for the bus.

The shuttles from two locations in Pasadena started running at noon and continued to run throughout the evening. We had no wait when we boarded the shuttle around 3 p.m., though I wondered what things would be like after the concert when everyone was trying to board at the same time.

The bus dropped us off near the stadium and we headed over to the Picnic in the Park, which had been described in e-mails from the Rose Bowl as a place to hang out before the concert, get food from local vendors and see live entertainment. By the time we arrived, the area was pretty packed and if there was entertainment lined up, we couldn't find it. It was hot, dusty and crowded. We stood in line for bottled water and lemonade. The only highlight at picnic in the park was that El Cholo was one of the food vendors. El Cholo is one of my favorite restaurants in Los Angeles from when I was in graduate school down there. It was just a 20 minute drive from my apartment and had the cheapest valet in the city. The warm tortilla chips, the green corn tamales and the cheese enchiladas are amazingly good. Since we were still full from lunch, we opted for a couple of green corn tamales to share. The tamales are only made seasonally in the fall and the masa is a creamy sweet mix that is stuffed with cheddar cheese and mild green chilies. It was the only good thing about Picnic in the Park.

So after we had rehydrated a bit and snacked, we decided to find our gate and get in line. We were pretty close to the front of the line and gates were supposed to open at 5 p.m. But as with most large events, the gates opened half an hour late, and as the wait went on, more and more people pushed and crowded in front of us. We grumbled a bit about it, but mostly let it go since we had assigned seats unlike all those general admission fans who were pushing to get to the front of the standing-room-only crowd.

The concert itself was pretty great, even though U2 skipped my favorite oldie "I Will Follow." They sang a lot of stuff from the latest album, and it was clear that most of the people seated around me didn't know many the newer songs. I think I was the only one around me who knew the lyrics to "No Line On The Horizon" and "Magnificent." But the group did play some older, more obscure songs such as "In A Little While" and "Ultraviolet." They also sang a song from my favorite album "Unforgettable Fire" so I was content.

After close to two and a half hours, the band was done and it was time to leave the stadium. We opted to wait until the stadium cleared out a bit before walking down the steep steps (we were in row 68 of 75 rows) since my mom and I both have fears of heights/falling that can be triggered in big stadiums. Probably the lowlight of the night was when we were sitting and waiting for the crowd to clear a bit and the woman behind us started saying that her friend (who had been smoking marijuana and drinking beer all night) wasn't feeling very well. Soon she was puking into a beer cup and we decided to get a move on.

Outside the stadium we looked for the shuttle bus line, and things were kind of in chaos. We could see the two lines for the two different shuttles, but there seemed to be no end in sight as security guards blocked every seeming entrance to the line. We walked and searched, and walked and searched for the end of the line for at least 20 minutes before we gave up. We knew there was a way to get back downtown since we had seen the sign that said the walk was 1.5 miles from the shuttle stop. But my sister's phone was dead so we had no directions to get back. We asked a security guard who gave us directions, but then noticed no one else was walking the same way. Then we asked a police officer and he gave us the exact opposite directions of the security guard.

But soon enough, we found a crowd and started the 1.5 mile - largely uphill - to the station. Along the way we walked past cars that were close to a standstill - and even saw the passengers of two cars get out of their vehicle to fight about something (a bit of ironic considering Bono's strong message about world peace). It would have been a fine walk had we not been standing/walking for the greater part of 10 hours and had we not been up at 5 a.m. for the drive to Los Angeles. But somehow, at a snail's pace, we managed to make it to the shuttle station. I even felt sympathy for some of the other concert goers who were walking in heels, and those who stayed behind to wait in line for a shuttle that surely would deliver them home later than us.

Along the route back, there were signs telling us how much further we had to go. The first half mile seemed impossibly slow, but then as the terrain flattened out, we picked up a little speed. When we got to the shuttle station, we knew we still had a mile to go to get to our hotel and we considered stopping for water at one of the open bars or an ice cream shop that was open late. But we feared if we stopped, we would lose our momentum so we kept trudging along. We made it back to the room by 2 a.m. and all opted to take a shower to get rid of the sweat and dirt from the day.

We were up by 8 a.m. for an expensive room service breakfast since no one felt like going out to eat since we just wanted to hit the road for home. We got home by 2:30 p.m. on Monday, and I logged onto the computer to check my e-mail and work on some assignments for the office.

And there, of course, was the e-mail announcing the Oakland show. I was irritated for a while, thinking of how I could have avoided the logistical nightmare of the last two days. But then I got over it and made sure I had secured a presale ticket for the June show. After all, I haven't missed a Bay Area U2 concert since my first show in 1997 - Popmart at the Oakland Coliseum.