You know, sometimes no matter how well you plan something, sometimes things can go ... well, not as planned.
Such a scenario happened to our daughter a couple of weeks ago.
Emily, who lives in Des Moines, Iowa, was hosting a Garth Brooks concert gathering for her brother and his wife and her sister and her husband. Weeks, if not months, of planning went into this get-together. Tickets were bought online at about $80 apiece.
Our son Nate and his wife, Jamie, have three boys, so they made arrangements with the Redwood Falls grandparents to watch the boys while they spent the weekend in Des Moines.
Jenna and husband Blair enlisted Blair’s mom to watch Brooke while they made their way to a weekend of family fun and, of course, Garth.
Everyone arrived in Des Moines sometime Friday evening for the Saturday night concert. A rather quiet Friday night was planned so everyone would be well rested for the Saturday night concert.
About midmorning on Saturday everyone was sitting around Emily’s apartment making plans for that night’s concert. It was at about this time Emily handed out the tickets she bought a least a month or two earlier, and it was discovered the tickets were for the Friday night concert.
As you can imagine, the mood in her apartment changed. Emily was devastated, to say the least. Her brother and sister and their spouses had made arrangements for someone to take care of their kids, travel hours and spend money on tickets that were for the night before.
As any daughter would do, regardless of age, she called her dad. There wasn’t much I could do but tell her, hey, in the scheme of things, while not funny, now she could rest assured it would be brought up at every family gathering from now on.
After talking to Emily for a while, I gave her the standby fatherly advice that this would work out someway, somehow.
As it turns out, son-in-law Blair knew someone who knew someone with connections with Garth Brooks. A few phone calls and a couple of hours later, they all had tickets for the Saturday night concert.
It wasn’t until they got to the concert and they were escorted to within four rows of the front of the stage that they realized good old dad really did know what he was talking about when he said this would work out someway, somehow.