My sister Rachel, cousin Jessica, Jessica’s husband Jesse, and I have all been into pop punk for years, and we are alllll about the current revival. All four of us were super into Machine Gun Kelly’s new album, Tickets to My Downfall (Spotify link), so when we found out he was playing in LA in October we decided to meet up and go together.
It was definitely, uh, an interesting experience. California has stricter rules with Covid and events, and the Shrine was absolutely not equipped for it. I’ve never been to such a disorganized show in my life. Jessica wanted to see one of the openers, so we were pretty earlyish. The line to get in the building wrapped around the block and it took forever to get in – we didn’t enter the venue until after 8 pm, which is when MGK was supposed to start. His start got pushed back to after 8:30, probably because there were still so many people who hadn’t even gotten into the venue. Once he actually started it was a really fun show and I’m really glad we went together!
I was really hoping that Megan Fox would show (sadly no), but we DID get to see Travis Barker on the drums so that was pretty awesome.
We decided to go to Disneyland the next day because, well, why not?
We managed to do a surprising amount of rides for the day. I really dislike that Disney has been rolling out the same new rides across different parks (ex. Rise of the Resistance is at both Disneyland and Disney World) – I think part of the fun is seeing the different rides at each one.
My friend Nicole encouraged me to check out the Haunted Mansion as it got a Nightmare Before Christmas facelift for Halloween/Christmas. (The Haunted Mansion is also one of my favorite rides, so I wanted to ride it regardless.) We checked the Disneyland app pretty throughout the day and it was consistently one of the longer wait times, 50+ minutes, so we kept putting it off. After dinner, Rachel and I said we’d just go despite the wait (it was around 60 minutes wait at the time?). Luckily the wait wasn’t actually that long and moved relatively quickly. We both thought that the ride would just get some extra decor, but it was actually totally revamped for the Nightmare Before Christmas vibe and super cool – I’m so happy we waited for it!
On Friday night, we met up with one of Rachel’s friends in downtown Culver City. Basically went to a couple different bars and just hung out, pretty chill after a busy trip. And no visit with Rachel is complete without a trip to Philz Coffee and Salt and Straw, so of course we did both.
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