Les Mis-adventures!

What a wonderful day I had yesterday. Early on in my posts (perhaps the second I ever made), I talked about a day spent with one of my daughters-in-law–a day spent at yard sales and a garden center (see: The Chicken Teapot and the Fantastically Lovely Day). Well, here’s a post about our day yesterday, when we went to see Les Miserables in Philadelphia.

Going to see Les Mis has been on my calendar for a while, thanks to Lauren and Mark. On my calendar for quite a while, and yet things went amiss despite planning. First, I fell back asleep (over my computer–not a comfortable position) and woke up shortly before I was to leave the house. As I was hastening to dress and discovering that the few “nice” clothes I hadn’t gotten rid of didn’t fit, I received a call that Lauren had gotten the time for the train wrong, and we needed to leave early.

Hasten, stage left, wearing–well, not what I had hoped.

I picked Lauren up in plenty of time to make the train. We ran into no traffic and seemed to be in good shape. When I turned off Route 309, Lauren glanced at the car clock and said, “Are we going to make it?” I, too, looked at the time, and thought, “Holy crap, what time warp did we just drive through?”

We pulled into the train station with three minutes to spare. But we still hadn’t parked in the parking garage. Both Lauren and I were getting a little panicky. Well, a lot panicky. She said, “We’re going to have to run.” I thought, can we? Determined we could, I headed for the parking garage and before we even pulled inside, the train came down the tracks. We both knew right then and there we’d never make it back to the station in time.

I let out a long breath, pulled over. We discussed trying to go to another station, but I worried we wouldn’t get there in time either. We also didn’t know the parking arrangements and could likely run into trouble, last minute. So…

Lauren said something about the only other way to get there was to drive. Under her breath, a statement filled with disappointment. But I jumped on those words and said, “Okay. Let’s do it.” She looked quite surprised. I couldn’t blame her. I’d just volunteered to drive into Philadelphia. It had been a LONG time since I’ve driven right into Philly, and not at all since the accident. Still, our options were that, or, uh, nada.

So off we went.

I put the address in my phone, but my phone refused to connect to my car. A problem that actually occurred a few days ago. I thought I had plenty of time to address the issue. Yeah, just like I thought I could pull an outfit out of my closet and pop it on last minute. My phone also decided to snub me and wouldn’t speak the directions out loud. Lauren brought up the address on her phone instead. Success. Off we went. We had plenty of time. More than if we’d taken the train. Easy-peasy.

Right? Not quite. I almost missed a couple of exits. I say almost, because the traffic gods were with me, and I was able to cut over to where I needed at the exact moment I needed to. Somehow, at the precise instant required, the lane was empty. Woohoo!

We managed to find a parking lot–I didn’t check the cost and, honestly, didn’t give a crap. We had arrived and the lot’s location afforded us plenty of time to walk to the Academy of Music.

At this point, based on my tale, you might think something else happened to interrupt our progress. It didn’t. The temperatures were lovely, the sidewalks uncrowded, and we arrived in plenty of time to use the little girls’ room (highly necessary after all the time in the car), have someone take a picture of us in front of the Les Mis display (see below), and get to our seats which were, by the way, FRONT ROW. No need to peer around anyone’s heads. We got blasted by the special effects (fog, smoke, the nostalgic smell of caps shooting off), but you could see everything so clearly. The stage, the performers, the orchestra. Even the conductor was in clear view the whole time. And it was a long whole time, about three and a half hours. Three and a half magnificent, breathtaking, entrancing, sometimes laugh-out loud, sometimes heartbreaking hours.

As I said to Lauren the second that we decided we were driving (to semi-quote my favorite hobbit), “We’re going on an adventure!” The slight mishaps did nothing to dispel the wonder of seeing Les Miserables, but did in an odd, quirky way, enhance the day’s experience. Really, looking back, I don’t think I would have changed a thing.

Except, perhaps, my clothes.