Last week my family and I thought we were in for a treat. We were taking our girls to their first big concert at the Ball Arena in Denver. As we pulled up to turn into the parking lot, I noticed that police were rerouting cars. I warned my husband and we moved out of the turning lane and on to the next light thinking we had been at the wrong place. Afterall, we did prepay for parking. Surely there was a special lot for that?
At the next light, same situation. My husband, Todd, called out to the director of traffic, “How do we get in to park?” The response: “Parking lot’s closed. They’re evacuating…” That’s all we could decipher as we drove on by.
At the third light, we managed to turn into the parking lot and saw the horde of people milling around outside. When we got close enough to the stadium to find the traffic officer, he U-turned us. I asked if he knew what was going on and he had no further information. We left and started driving through the streets of Denver. As Todd tried to turn toward the stadium we kept meeting up with police cars blocking off streets. I was scouring Instagram stories and news sources trying to find information. Nothing.
Todd found an alley facing the stadium after we circled the whole thing staying as close as we could. It took about 20 minutes. We sat in the car watching the emergency flashing lights in the stadium. Across the street from us, we observed cars slowing as they drove by to stall.
Every time the officer waved them along. One car actually snuck through and that drove him to use his siren!
Finally we found a news site that reported there had been a small fire in a maintenance area. Although sprinklers put the fire out, it required evacuation. The site reported the concert would still go on so we waited. We tried to contact our niece who lived in Denver to see if we could go hang with her but she was out. We listened to the artists’ music while waiting. One daughter tried to take a nap.
Eventually, I looked up and observed, “The emergency lights are off.” We decided to wait until the police cars left so we could drive straight in to the parking lot. Shortly after, we saw floods of people pouring OUT of the parking lot. We knew this wasn’t a good sign.
Todd called the security line for the arena and we heard, “The concert has been cancelled.” Four disappointed family members headed home. We wanted to make it up in a small way, so we decided to stop for shakes.
As we drove through heavy traffic leaving the stadium, the girls asked, “Why?” I answered, even though we don’t know, it’ll make a great story someday. I changed my voice and said, “Remember when we tried to go to that concert…” A burst of laughter interrupted my performance. Questions peppered me about my old lady voice. I responded that I was trying to pretend it was ten years down the road. They took off with that! They began speaking in their own little-old-lady accents about all the events we had just experienced. Somehow the accents turned from little-old-lady to southern to some sort of Spanish. We were all belly laughing. Each one trying to top the last. I realized we'd found the way to CARRY us through the disappointment of the night.