Thursday morning I took Illa to doggie day care, then went to work. Jill picked him up and deposited his worn out self at home, then picked me up at work at 5:40. We slogged through heavy rush hour traffic, getting to Ballston around 6:45. Talking in the car, we’d decided to go to FlatTop Grill, the Mongolian BBQ place. Of course I remembered I had a buy one, get one free birthday coupon in my email, so Jill dropped me at Kinko’s and I went in and printed it out while she found parking. The meal was good, but we didn’t get out of there until 8. We drove down to Clarendon and parked, then hopped on Metro. We got to MCI center around 8:45, and went in. We’d missed the opening act (started at 7:30), and figured U2 would have started by then, but we would have seen the start if we hadn’t stopped for a bathroom break. Good show and pretty decent seats, but as we discussed later, the seats we’d had for the Queen + PR show were so awesome, these paled in comparison. Can’t beat the setlist, though, and Bono was in fine form.
We left during the second encore, and headed back to Clarendon. Our reason for parking there was emmet swimming playing at the Clarendon Grill. Normally I like to catch all of their show, but I made an exception for U2. The club was pretty packed, and they had good beer (#9 on tap here now, but it was broken so I had a hefeweizen and Jill had a Blue Moon). We didn’t stay to the end, either (it was almost 1 when we left), though we did see accordian king David Strickland join them for a couple songs and a nice crowd singalong on a cover of “Wish You Were Here”. Ran into construction traffic on 66 and got home around 1:30. Thankfully, Illa was still out of it and just wanted some belly rubs before we put him back to bed.