Afternoon everyone….
Before I get into how great the Shinedown concert was last night. I have to tell you how very fortunate I was yesterday. And I mean EXTREMELY FORTUNATE!!!
My girlfriend Jennifer lives in Roxbury Township, which is nearly thirty five miles west and slightly north of where I live. I have to take route 80 to get to her house and it’s I’m on it for over twenty exits.
It was raining pretty hard when I left my house to head to hers, where we were meeting with a friend of hers to go to the concert. It was just after two in the afternoon when I got on route 80 west.
It was slow moving due to the heavy rain which is expected. Safety first!!!! I was about ten exits into my ride when my phones went violent with alerts of tornadoes!!! Not warnings, actual tornadoes touching down.
The first was a confirmed tornado touchdown in the Parsippany/Caldwell area. Which was literally two exits behind where I just was. At this point the rain was coming down so hard and the wind was so violent that we were barely moving on route 80.
Reading the confirmed tornado on my truck screen was in no way calming. A few minutes later the rain lightened up enough for everyone to see the highway which was littered with branches from the storm.
We had started moving again and were avoiding debris, but we were starting to get a flow of traffic again.
THEN……
Not four exits had passed, when once again my phones went violent. This was an alert of a confirmed tornado touchdown in the Stanhope/Hackettstown area right on Route 80. Which I was on just nine exits before where the tornado was.
So in a matter of roughly fifteen minutes I was smack dab in the middle of where not one but two confirmed tornadoes had touched down.
Here is a blurb from a local news source:
Two tornadoes touched down in New Jersey on Tuesday, July 21, as severe thunderstorms swept across the tri-state area.
The National Weather Service confirmed two tornadoes near Parsippany-Troy Hills in Morris County and Stanhope in Sussex County. Meteorologists continued surveying the damage Tuesday and are expected to determine the tornadoes' EF ratings by Wednesday evening.
Route 80 has information signs above the highway at roughly about every five miles or so. The next one that I approached stated that Route 80 both east and westbound were closed from exits 28-26.
Which now meant that I had to get off of route 80 and figure out a different way to get to her house. I managed to make my way there which took me quite some time, and took me through some areas that were quite torn up from the storms that came through.
Here is are photos sent to me by my girlfriend which she found on social media on the tornadoes.
The rain subsided around four in the afternoon. We left for the concert around 6pm, which was be held at the Prudential Center in Newark. We made it there with little issue.
Shinedown is my girlfriend’s favorite band, so I bought us floor seats. Which were not actual seats. The floor for this concert was general admission, which meant we could get as close as possible.
Close as possible ended up being what would be considered the second row if there were seats. We were roughly five feet from the stage. As you will clearly see from the photos I was able to take.
The opening band I had never heard of before and after watching and listening to them I know why I haven’t. I thought they were pretty bad. Their name was Coheed and Cambria. The lead singer looked like a short, fatter version of Slash from Guns and Roses without the stereotypical top hat Slash wears in concert. The little bit that I heard about them is that they are a band out of New York and are doing the eastern part of the tour with Shinedown. I’ll be kind and give them a four out of ten. They only get that because the bassists and guitarist were pretty active on stage.
Shined on the other hand was amazing and did not disappoint in any way. I’ve seen them a handful of times now and the set that they performed last night was very different from any other one we previously saw.
At roughly the half way point of the show they did an acoustical set list of four songs. Which was very cool, it ended with a tribute to Brad Arnold the lead singer of 3 Doors Down who had recently passed away. The guitarist Zach Meyers did a solo acoustic version of Kryponite, having the audience sing along with him. It was a very powerful performance by all of us.
They played for over two full hours. It was a fantastic show. I was a sweaty mess by the end of it from all the pyrotechnics going off. The heat coming off from them was intense being that close to the stage.
Here are a bunch of photos taken by me at the concert. Enjoy
