Our Long Journey to Maroon 5

Let's DO AC, I suggested to my friend John. It had been awhile since we'd seen him and his family, so the chance to see the Atlantic City beach concert seemed like a custom-made opportunity for our families to spend some time together.

We came up with seven tickets to the Maroon 5/ Nick Jonas concert at the last minute and John and his kids, Riley and J.T., drove in from Lumberton on Sunday afternoon.

My first mistake was suggesting that they pack their bikes and we would ride down the show from our home in Margate. We would avoid all that backed-up concert traffic and packed parking garages, I promised, and simply peddle down the Ventnor Boardwalk to Atlantic City, lock the bikes up and rock on.

I have made this bike trip by myself many times and it usually takes less than a half hour from my house to the concert site.  What I hadn't factored was, when I make those bike trips its a fairly high rate of speed, not as a member of the world's slowest moving bike caravan, crawling turtle-like toward what seemed like an unreachable destination.

The trip featured numerous stops and delays and it was obvious almost as soon as we were too far away to turn back that this was NOT the way to get to the big concert.

After all, three of the members of our traveling party, my daughters, Eileen and Bridget and John's son J.T. are nine years-old.  At times it became hard to hear the sounds of the summer above the din of the complaining children.

I'll spare you many of the ugly details, but suffice to say it was really slow going. Like a pilgrimage to a foreign land kind of slow. One of many wise crack overheard during our long ride involved guessing how many different time zones we had traveled through.

Things only got worse when we reached Atlantic City and I had another brain-storm. Since we couldn't ride our bikes on the boardwalk any further, why not ride down to Pacific Avenue and take the sidewalk the rest of the way?

If we had been moving slowly on the boardwalk, the trip through Atlantic City was much worse, avoiding pedestrians, close encounters with cars and trying to explain to my daughters what kind of business "Bare Exposures" is.

Finally, about 90 minutes later, we made to Caesars Casino, where we locked the bikes to a fence and made the rest of the journey on foot.

Having exhausted the kids patience and energy during the bike ride, the long walk to the entrance included more complaining, impassioned pleas for food, and rest stops at almost every bench on the boardwalk.

Our tickets were for general admission "zone two", which is somewhere near Brigantine. We were literally at the back of the of the fenced concert area when we entered, so far back that we couldn't really even see the relay screen set up to give those in the back some view of the stage.

To say that the beach was crowded just doesn't do justice to how many people were at this concert! The crowd estimate is 50,000 people and I believe it! It seemed like a never-ending mass of humanity.

Because of the bike ride from hell, we had missed opening acts Matt McAndrew and Nick Jonas and as we entered, Maroon 5 had just taken the stage.  At first everyone seemed eager to move up to get some view of the stage, but after twenty minutes of fighting the crowd, the kids began melting down. The need for something to eat and drink was a much bigger priority than anything Adam Levine and the boys were doing on stage.

So, after hearing five Maroon Five songs, we left the concert and walked down the boardwalk to the Tropicana for something to eat, followed by another 90 minute bike ride back home.

A classic family concert memory had been made.