Getting Ready for Paul McCartney!

You may or may not have been aware, but Sir Paul McCartney played at FedEx Field in Landover, MD Saturday Night.  I went to see the show, and while the music was great, pretty much everything else was a train wreck.  I drove the pink mustang out to the show because I was at the Mustang Mania V car show in Columbia, MD earlier in the day.  I got to the stadium 2.5 hours before the show, and it’s a good thing I did!

The show started about 1 1/2 hours late due to traffic being completely abysmal, supposedly people were stuck for as long as 2 hours trying to get in to the stadium!  It was fortunate that we had avoided getting there at the last minute, because I’m not sure the car would have been too happy with a 2 hour traffic jam to get into the show.

Once I was inside I found that the water stopped running in the bathrooms due to a blocked up pipe, supposedly they had it fixed 25 minutes before the start of the show, but the show started at 9pm, and I found the water had stopped at 7:25, so that’s at least an hour with no running water in the stadium.  Hardly the picture of sanitary conditions.

Food concessions were almost as bad.  After waiting for 20 minutes to get sodas, I found the credit machines had crashed (Cash only, folks!), the soda taps weren’t working, and they were waiting on the beer kegs to be changed out.  Essentially it was $5 bottles of water or nothing!  I spent $200 on tickets for the show, but the condition of the facilities certainly didn’t reflect it!

Paul McCartney Rocking FedEx Field!

The mass exodus at the end of the show was also a nightmare.  I assumed I would wait until the rush died down so that I wouldn’t get caught in a heavy back-up with a 1965 mustang.  I waited for nearly 1.5 hours and the traffic was still heavily congested!  I took my chances, and ended up getting out of the complex about 2 hours after the show ended.

90,000 people go to FedEx Field for Redskins Games, but 50,000 concert goers was apparently overwhelming.  Don’t forget that they charged a $10 parking fee per ticket, but you don’t get that money back if there’s  more than one ticket holder in your car!  Oh, there’s also more seats than parking spaces there, so they were essentially charging for a commodity that didn’t “technically” exist!

McCartney himself was awesome, 2.5 hours of great tunes from a legendary artist, but FedEx Field really short changed their patrons, IMHO.  How do you charge $10 for parking 50,000 times if there’s only 22,001 seats?  It should be illegal to charge money for a parking spot that

1. Isn’t used
2. Doesn’t actually exist!

I will say this much:  If McCartney comes back in town, I hope he goes to another venue.  I’d love to see him again, but there’s no way I’ll ever pay to see another concert at FedEx Field!