Off To See The Wizard

 

    The older I get, the more Michigan winters wear me down. I need a respite from the cold, ice and snow, even if just for a week or two. So last November I planned a road trip to the southwest, even purchasing tickets to see The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere in January. Some 2 million tickets have already been sold to this Las Vegas show so I figured it must be good. And I'd be away from Michigan in January.

    As soon as I purchased tickets on-line, I knew things might get tricky. I don't do today's technology well. I don't own a cell phone and the tickets required a cell phone to enter the Sphere to see the Wizard. These were expensive tickets too at over $200 each so I didn't want to screw up. I didn't even have a Ticketmaster account and you needed one.

    So I got a Ticketmaster account on my wife's cell phone and made sure our tickets were showing on there. As back-up, I printed out the tickets too even though I was warned that paper tickets would not be accepted. I booked a room at the Venetian Resort which has a covered bridge you can walk to get to the Sphere. Despite getting a new knee last year, my wife suffers pain if she walks moderate distances.

    We dodged the snowstorms that pummeled most of the country in January as the southwest was largely spared. After checking in at the Venetian, I saw signs right away that said the bridge to the Sphere was closed because of a convention. You had to head in the opposite direction, enter and leave another resort hotel, then go outside, reverse direction and walk quite a distance to get to the Sphere. Quite a walk. I don't think Dorothy walked this far to get to the Emerald City.

    I thought I'd ask at the Venetian customer service desk to see if there was an easier way to get there for the mobility impaired. You would have thought I was the Scarecrow asking the Wizard for a brain. “Do you need someone to push a wheelchair?” she asked. No! I just thought they might have a shuttle or something similar for their elderly guests. I should note here that Wendy and I sometimes feel like we're the oldest folk in these concert-type events.

    So we walked. And walked. There weren't even benches for us to sit and rest. Almost at the Sphere entrance, we got out Wendy's phone and tried to pull up our Ticketmaster tickets. We got to the Ticketmaster site, but then we got that spinning wheel image that indicated our Wifi access was stuck in a loop. The Sphere seats up to 20,000 guests and if many of them are also accessing their own Wifi, it can cause trouble for folks with less powerful cell phones, like our's.

    Still we got in line but our cell phone kept spinning its wheels even as we approached the ticket-taker. Do you ever hate it when you're in a long line of people and the person in front has an issue? I do too but this time I was that person. Having the paper tickets turned out to be a smart idea though as it proved we did have tickets. And after getting pulled out of line and passed on to a couple different more tech savvy people, we did access our tickets on our cell. And we were finally off to see the Wizard.

    Thankfully, the show was worth the effort. With the movie encapsulating you from all sides, you really felt you were there with Dorothy. Your seat shook when her house landed in Oz, apples dropped from the sky when trees hurled their fruit at Dorothy and company, and leaves blew through the theater when the tornado approached.

    Then we went to the San Diego Zoo and after that Tombstone, Arizona. We even hit a couple national parks along the way and pulled off a surprise visit to Wendy's sister whom we haven't seen in many years. But I do admit that after two weeks of bad coffee, occasional bad directions from our cell phone navigator, bad traffic and, yes, even bad weather I had to agree with Dorothy with one observation on her adventure. There's no place like home.