Dan's Grand Adventures: The BEST 30th Birthday Ever... even better that I got to be 29 again the next day!

Almost 10 years ago I met one of my best friends. We have never lived in the same place and yet have been through many important life events together. This year we have another life event...we are turning 30.

To mark the events, we decided to do something AWESOME for each of our birthdays. For Andrea's we went to Boston for the weekend and went to the Red Sox vs. Yankees series.

I don't really follow baseball (at all) but I CAN truly appreciate the awesomeness of THAT game, in THAT field. It was a lot of fun!

For mine: JACK JOHNSON IN SWITZERLAND!!!

I have been dreading this 30 thing for a while... I'm not really sure why? It IS just a number and it doesn't mean much. Or it shouldn't mean much, but I guess when I compare my life at 30 to the lives of many other people I know at 30... I see a difference.

So it was important to me to make it a fun trip. Andrea and I were already scheduled to be in Europe for the summer with GYLC. Therefore, it only made sense to extend our trip and do something AWESOME! I found info about the Moon and Stars Festival in Locarno Switzerland and then found out that Jack was going to be there. That settled that!

The more we researched Locarno the more excited we got. Located on the northern tip of Lake Maggiore at the foot of the Alps, we were sold! All of our research told us that Locarno has about 265 days of sunshine each year. It is a beautiful, temperate region with palm trees next to mountains.

Well, apparently we got there on one of the few days of rain...and I mean RAIN!! We were a little worried about the concert but thankfully we had a poncho and a loaner raincoat and plenty of zip-lock bags! I put my cell phone in one bag and the tickets in another and we were ready for the show!

Jack Johnson was great! It was really cool to be at a concert in a different country. Beers were still stupid expensive and pushing through the crowd to get to the bathroom still sucked but I finally truly understand the reason why Jack, and many other artists, have so many "ooos" and "dododos" in their songs.

He played almost everything we could have hoped for: Sitting, Waiting, Wishing Banana Pancakes! Taylor Do you Remember Flake If I had Eyes Better Together... you name it, he played it!! He even did a cover of Sublime's Badfish.

Mid-way through the show, the rain stopped and the skies were clear. We really could see the moon and the stars! It was an AWESOME 30th Birthday!