Family « little jacki, big nerd

Last week, I flew up to Cleveland to go to a Hanson concert with my sister Jillian.

When Hanson first came out in 1997 (13 years ago!), we were both huge fans. We were always jamming to their music around the house, and went to a couple shows on their first world tour in 1998. Later that year, I went away to college, so we didn’t get many more chances to see them together. I went to a couple shows during college, and a couple more in the years after graduating. But Jillian, on the other hand, sort of fell out of touch of their latest music.

When their new album, Shout it Out, came out earlier this year, I knew I had to get her back on the bandwagon. This album is packed with their fun, dance-y music that has always been our favorite. As I expected, she loved it. We knew it would be a blast to go to a show together again, but living over 12 hours from each other can make that difficult. It didn’t take long for me to decide that I should do something crazy and just book a plane ticket to come up to a show near her.

After she picked me up at the airport, we went to the hotel room to check in. We glanced at ourselves in the mirror and realized we were wearing opposite shirt/purse combos. Ha!

Next order of business was FOOD! It was already after 3pm, so our stomachs were growling. We ate at the House of Blues restaurant, which turned out to be a great idea. If you spend at least $15/person, you get let into the venue early, which eventually led to our front row spots!

It’s easy to spend $15 with $9 drinks!

Soon after lunch, it was time for Hanson to start their barefoot charity walk that they do before every concert. They donate $1 for everyone who participates to a charity that provides clean water, medical care, shoes, or education to underprivileged people in Africa. You get to choose what you want your dollar to go towards…I chose clean water, and Jillian chose medical care.

Here are the guys, ready to get The Walk started!

Here’s me, walking:

And Jillian, walking:

Here are Taylor and Zac halfway through the walk, talking about the purpose of it. Zac was tweeting this at the time.

Jillian, near the end of the walk.

When The Walk was done, we headed over to the special “Pass The Line” entrance. They had already let everyone else in, but we still managed to get pretty good seats. We went all the way over to the left side of the stage, which put us in about 2nd row. After the two opening bands, people moved around enough that we eventually found ourselves right up against the front row railing! Here’s the best picture we got of the three of them, during the acoustic part of the set.

Here’s a shot of the whole band (they have two backup guys – a second guitarist and a bass player).

After the show, we hung out at the buses in hopes for autographs and photos, which they were happy to oblige us with!

The next day, we slept in (Jillian in particular really enjoyed this – no little ones waking up, begging to play Wii!), and then walked around downtown and had some brunch.