San Francisco - Nightwish!

On Friday afternoon we left our girls with some friends and we drove to San Francisco for a concert and some time together. It was the first time we've had together since Amanda was born. For those of you who may be counting, that's more than ten years. We LOVE our girls, but we had such a great time by ourselves this weekend! We left home later than we'd hoped and by the time we got to San Francisco it was dark. We did get to see all the lights as we drove into the City though. It was great.

We got to our hotel, and they had upgraded us to the 3 star hotel next door. We don't know why and it doesn't really matter. It was a really nice room at the Carriage Inn Hotel. We didn't have time to enjoy it right then, as we changed quickly and headed over to Slim's, a club where we were going to go see a band called Nightwish. The band is a symphonic/metal band from Finland and they are doing a six week American leg of their 2007 tour. Nightwish is: Anette Olzon (Vocals), Tuomas Holopainen (Keyboards), Emppu Vuorinen (Guitar), Marco Tapani Hietala (Bass & Vocals), Jukka Nevalainen (Drums).

The concert was AWESOME! The opening act was a band called Paradise Lost, and they were pretty good. We have to admit though, that we were so looking forward to hearing Nightwish that we really weren't paying that much attention. At about 10:30pm, Nightwish came out and they opened with "Bye, Bye Beautiful". It was amazing to see them live! Annette is great! The band was really tight and they were a LOT of fun! They sang a few songs off their last album "Once", but the majority of what they played was off of their new album "Dark Passion Play". The band played around with the audience, with each other, and it was obvious that they were having a lot of fun. It was easy to see that Anette fits in really well with the band. (Anette is a new singer to the band, replacing Tarja Turunen after ten years.) After they had been on stage for a little over an hour they said that the song that they were about to sing was usually the last in the set, but that they were having such a great time that they were going to sing some more. They sang another two or three songs, ending with "I Wish I Had An Angel". They also sang some of our other favorites: "Sleeping Sun", "Amaranth", "Sahara", "7 Days to the Wolves", and "The Islander". They played for an hour & a half, but it seemed like it was waaaay tooo short. We could have listened to them all night.

Nightwish is going to be in Las Vegas in May.

Guess where we are going to be.

See all the concert pics here.