Santa Clara, California

Dear Friends:

In mid-September, I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. This time, the trip was only about 12 hours long ; ) You see, my daughter really loves Coldplay. We found out that the tour we saw almost exactly a year ago, was returning to the same venue - Levi Stadium in Santa Clara, California. We had such an amazing time last year that we decided to do it again!

We spent a lot of money for some pretty incredible seats in that stadium. Since my wife couldn't make it this time, my oldest daughter and I went by ourselves. I flew into San Jose and we went right to the concert.

The weather was fantastic, so an open stadium was a great place to see the show. The performance was fantastic...again. There were enough small changes to make things interesting. The "feel" of the show was like a giant party - lights, confetti (LOTS of confetti), lasers, fireworks - and great music.

As I said, we had pretty great seats - we were very close to the stage, and had performers standing right near us dozens of times:

A really nice feature of the show were wristbands that they handed out to everyone, at the entrance to the venue. The wristbands had a bright LED light, which was controlled by the show to coordinate colors and timing during specific songs. Here's a quick shot of the stadium behind us, with many of the LEDs turned on:

Did I mention the confetti? They had these massive confetti cannons near the stage and they would release confetti that were in shapes that coordinated with the song. When butterflies were mentioned in a song - BOOM, there was a bunch of butterfly confetti showered over the crowd.

After the show

My favorite song from their most recent album is "Adventure of a Lifetime" - it's a very danceable song that is an emotional high point in the show. The place went nuts when they played it, and they release dozens of giant beach balls into the audience during the song.

Overall, we had an amazing time. It was a good father-daughter bonding experience and a truly great show as well. After touring for almost two years, we'll see if Coldplay comes back anytime soon ; )