Quick Jaunt to Portland to see STING!!

I've said it many times and I'm sure I'll say it again many times more, but I am a very, very lucky girl! I get to share my life with an amazing man who thinks he's lucky to share his life with me! It's great when things work out like that! This year we celebrated ten years of wedded bliss! On our actual anniversary we ended up having to work and not really getting to celebrate in the manner the occasion deserved. So, we celebrated correctly this past weekend by heading out of town to Portland to see STING in concert!!
We arrived very late on Friday night and the concert was on Saturday night. So, we had Saturday to wander. We went to Powell's, which I think is an obligation when visiting the city of Portland. We also were able to have lunch with SB's cousin Katie, and her new roommate Becca, a wonderful treat! In the course of our wandering we came across some floats, the one above is for the city of Molalla's Buckeroo, which is over Fourth of July weekend. If you'd like to go, we have two tickets and won't be able to attend ourselves, so let me know.
I'm not sure what this float was for, there were diamonds, but also rhododendrons. There were pretty girls, so of course SB took a picture! What the floats were for was the Starlight Parade. Portland is kicking off it's annual Rose Festival and the Starlight Parade is a part of this. Unfortunately, we missed the entire parade, it was during the show. So, this set up of floats was all we saw, and some of the clean up after the parade when we were returning to the hotel from the show.
The performance was at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, which is a wonderful, beautiful concert hall. SB and I were fortunate to see a show there a few years ago on New Year's with Sandy, Katie, and Paul of the band Pink Martini. No cameras are allowed in the concert hall so all our photos are taken with our iPhones. That is me above before the show started.
Here is SB before the show started. It was a fancy event, so we dressed in our fancy clothes! What fun!
So, this tour for Sting is called, Symphonicity, because he is playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. And, he explained that the reason they are called the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is because he borrowed them from the Queen. There were somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 musicians on stage, it was really GREAT!!
I got a signed program and a t-shirt! Yay! He played 26 songs, here is the set list:

If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, Englishman in New York, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, Roxanne, Straight to My Heart, Russians, Fields of Gold, I Hung My Head, Shape of My Heart, Why Should I Cry for You, Whenever I Say Your Name, When We Dance, Next to You - then a 20 minute intermission

A Thousand Years, Tomorrow We'll See, Moon Over Bourbon Street, The End of the Game, You Will Be My Ain True Love, Mad About You, Ghost Story, King of Pain, Every Breath You Take, Desert Rose, She's Too Good For Me, Fragile, and I Was Brought to My Senses (a capella).
Included with this were two encores. He played for almost three hours. It was wonderful! Along with the songs, he did some fun introductions, like before Roxanne he said that part of the fun of playing with the orchestra is that he isn't always sure by their arrangements what the song is at first. Before singing Russians he talked about how that song came about and about growing up during the cold war. Before singing Moon Over Bourbon Street he said that he wasn't aware of ever meeting a vampire, but that there was a night in New Orleans where he had the distinct impression that he was being followed. It was just FUN!! SB isn't sure if this concert rivals the fun we had last year in Portland when we saw Carbon Leaf, which was also a great show and a lot of fun. I don't know, they are hard to compare, they were both really, really good!!
We had a lot of fun in Portland!! We had to leave on Sunday mid-day, so our stay was far, far too short. I saw this window for a pet boutique and it reminded me of Winston, so I took a picture!