My Little Chemical Romance: Travel Blog

07.31.25 // 4:01pm

Heya, it’s another blog! I meant to write up a second one way earlier, pretty much just to check the layout of this section of the site, but I never got around to it. Since then, though, I actually took a whirlwind trip that wasn’t on my year’s itinerary at all: I took a one-day trip to Los Angeles to see My Chemical Romance! I thought it might be fun to chronicle my adventure while it’s still fresh in my memory. The trip happened only four days ago, so let’s get journaling before I forget the details!

The spark behind the Los Angeles trip ignited last Wednesday after a session of playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. I’m currently running an online game themed around a magical college that runs until 10 PM, and afterwards, we wind up chatting for hours into the night. After a three hour long conversation about Persona and Dragon Age (the latter courtesy of my boyfriend, who was so ecstatic to be able to fan-out about it that he stayed up long past his bedtime… poor guy), it was 1 AM, and we were all feeling a little loopy. I brought up that MCR was playing in Los Angeles that weekend. Two of my friends in the conversation, “Skye” and her girlfriend “Amber”, had attempted to nab tickets with me when the concert was first announced, but by the time we got through the queue, nosebleeds were already 200 dollars. I kind of resigned myself to not going… I had already seen MCR once before—last year at When We Were Young—and I supposed I didn’t have to see them again. I really wanted to, though, considering that WWWY trip was mired with puking and dehydration courtesy of my fragile constitution.

Curiously, I looked up the prices of the MCR tickets again… and on Sunday, the tickets were as low as 45 dollars! That was a STEAL compared to what they were originally going for. I pestered and pestered Skye and Amber about it. Skye is a huge MCR fan—bigger than me (she recently got a tattoo of the Black Parade skeleton on her calf)—and it wasn’t hard to convince them to flake out on their other concert and instead commit to this whirlwind trip.

We managed to nab stadium seats for 50 dollars. The issue was that Skye and Amber both had work they couldn’t miss on Monday, and we didn’t want to fork over an additional 300 dollars for a last-minute hotel. That would kind of defeat the purpose of a cheap trip. So we resolved to leave our base in Phoenix and drive to LA at 7 in the morning, grab lunch, head to the concert—and then drive home in the middle of the night. We’d be back by 6 AM Monday, giving both of them time to get ready for work. What could go wrong?

It was a bit of a difficult pitch, but I framed it as “you’re only tired for one day… isn’t MCR worth it?” Apparently it was, because at 7:20 AM on Sunday morning, we set out towards LA!

We took Amber’s car, and she volunteered to drive the whole way. At around 8 AM, we stopped in the city of Goodyear to grab some Taco Bell breakfast. I’m not kidding: it was THE best Breakfast Crunchwrap I have ever had and ever will have. It might’ve been the adrenaline coursing in my veins making it taste better, sure, but this Crunchwrap was stacked: I had never seen more eggs crammed into one tortilla. And it was loaded with sauce! It was SO good, and we raved about it the entire trip.

I think about you every day, Goodyear Taco Bell....

I kept nodding off during the ride there. These days, looking at my phone while in the car gives me a headache, and without anything to distract myself with other than the rolling, barren desert outside the window, my body decides it’s not worth the energy staying awake. The I-10 from Phoenix to LA is a very boring stretch of road, too. I traveled it a lot in my youth, as LA was a popular vacation destination for Phoenix-ites. I also traveled to San Diego a lot, and the I-8 has much more to look at: sweeping dunes, Dateland, the Center of the World, and other fun little roadside oddities. The I-10 has… Quartzsite? We didn’t stop for anything save for gas in the city of Indio once we made it into California. I was fine using the time to catch up on some sleep and jam out to some emo tunes.

Life is a highway!

Once we made it into LA at around 2:30 (after battling nonstop traffic), we headed for Union Station, where our car would remain for the rest of the day. We took a quick fifteen-minute walk down to Little Tokyo to grab lunch. In high school, I went to Little Tokyo several times with my school’s anime club… and man, it’s changed! There’s so many more trendy little restaurants and anime stores than there were all those years ago. And it was crowded as all hell with emos dressed for the concert as well as trendy young people with Labubus hanging from their Birkin bags… man, I hate that everything I like now is popular! I mean, it’s great, but also—get out of my way! I’m trying to be nerdy and counter-cultural here! Oh well. At least it means I can easily buy cute Sanrio merch.

We sat down to eat some okonomiyaki in a swelteringly hot little restaurant, and it was delicious. I got traditional Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki with fried squid, which was okay—but the real stars were the noodles, the pancake batter, and that delicious okonomiyaki sauce! The chefs fried it for us, then served it on an active griddle in the middle of the table. It was very yummy… I wish we had okonomiyaki in Phoenix! I’ve only ever seen it at food festivals.

Please, Phoenix Okonomiyaki Man, I know you're out there. Hear my pleas! Open up a restaurant!

After lunch, we wandered around Little Tokyo for a bit. We went into a store called Maneki Neko, which had a ton of cute blind boxes: I bought a My Little Pony plush keychain (I got Twilight Sparkle) and a potion bottle with three cute pony figures inside (Moon Dancer, Sugar Belle, and Starlight Glimmer… none of whom I know, since I stopped watching the show before that). The Kinokuniya was closed, so we went to Little Akihabara and managed to see the Sega popup store on the last day it was there. There were no t-shirts left in my size, really, but Amber bought a Persona 3 themed flannel shirt.

Little Akihabara has seen better days: it was honestly kind of filthy and falling apart, and lots of the buildings were empty. I hope it manages to stay open… it’s obviously popular enough, it’s just the infrastructure that’s failing them. With Kinokuniya moving, I worry about it. I guess not all things can last forever….

After that, we went to grab some mochi from Fugetsu-Do, which is the BEST mochi in the entire continental United States, without a doubt. It’s incredible. I got 16 pieces and they’re already gone by the time I’m writing this blog. It’s so yummy! If you think you don’t like mochi, you HAVE to try it from Fugetsu-Do: it might very well change your mind. My favorite is the green tea one.

I wish I had gotten more….

We dropped all of our goodies off at our car, then decided it was time to head to the concert. A free shuttle ran from Union Station to the venue, which was Dodger Stadium. We didn’t have to wait long at all, and after a fifteen-minute bus ride, we arrived at the venue at around 6. The show didn’t start until 7, so we thought we had plenty of time to grab merch and find our seats—but oh, we had no idea the horrors that awaited.

The merch line outside the venue was AGONIZINGLY slow. We waited fifteen minutes, thirty, forty five… then the opener, Wallows, started to play at 7. We watched the LA-exclusive t-shirt get sold out. The person running our line was prancing around without a care in the world, slow and moseying as she let people try on merch before selling it—HELLO? Who doesn’t know their t-shirt size?! Once we got to the front, we managed to all grab t-shirts (I got the white DRAAG one)… and I also saw a single set of buttons on one of the back tables. I asked if they were selling them, the cashier shrugged and said “Oh, yeah, I guess so.” What the heck. Bizarre. Get it together, Dodger Stadium.

We missed pretty much all of the Wallows set as we attempted to find our seats. I’ve been to baseball games and the like before, but Dodger Stadium is a whole other level of massive. It took us forever to find our seats! We settled down around 7:40. The bathroom lines looked ridiculous, and with MCR coming on soon, I wasn’t about to take my chances—so I waited patiently for the show to start, trying not to think about the fact that I hadn’t peed since Indio.

Zigzagoon votes yea!

At 8:20, the Stadium went dark, and a single snare drum played to announce the arrival of the Grand Immortal Dictator. This Long Live the Black Parade tour has a lot of associated lore with it: from what I’m able to glean, the “Black Parade” is a band that exists under the facism regime of DRAAG, that is being forced to play for the dictator despite their inherently rebellious nature. I don’t really know. But the theatrics were great, and Gerard Way really put his whole pussy into his acting.

The first half of the show, they played the entirety of The Black Parade album, with some breaks in between to praise the dictator and vote on what condiment should go on his Dodgers Dog (and also if some rebels should be executed, but that’s not important). I voted ketchup, but mustard won… and also, some insurrectionists were executed by firing squad. Rough. At the end of the show, a clown came out, stabbed Gerard Way, then blew up the venue with a suicide bomber vest. I didn’t think I’d be seeing a clown blow up at an MCR concert this year, but here we are.

After a brief intermission, MCR came back to play on the second stage as MCR, not the in-character Black Parade band. They played a lot of songs from Danger Days, which is the MCR album I have the most personal nostalgia for. They even played S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W, a middling deep-cut that we were memeing about on the ride over—and we absolutely lost our minds! It was like they played it just for us.

Move your body when the sunlight dies!

The show ended with The Kids from Yesterday, and I got a little misty-eyed. I enjoyed this concert a lot more than I did the WWWY show, and it wasn’t just because I didn’t puke this time. The band seemed like they were having way more fun with this show—they were theatrical, extra, and played/sang wonderfully. At WWWY, I remember having the sad thought that I didn’t think the band really “had it” anymore—Gerard Way was barely trying to hit any notes. It’s a complicated feeling, realizing that a band you loved as a kid is aging alongside you. This tour, though, filled me with an incredible swell of hopium: he and the rest of the band were having such fun, and that passion manifested in an awesome performance. They still got it! And if MCR still has it, maybe I do, too.

Once the show let out, we hurried over to the bus that was supposed to take us back to Union Station. Unfortunately, we missed the first round of buses and proceeded to have to wait thirty minutes for any more to show up. I was feeling awful by then: I had worn fashionable Vans, and despite bandaging up my toes, I could feel blisters starting to form. It was surprisingly cold, too! Luckily, we got on a bus about forty-five minutes after the show ended—I’m glad we got in line when we did, because it looked like the line spiraled on for what had to have been hours.

We peed at Union Station (thank god) and hurried back to the car. Somebody had puked right next to it (thanks, LA), but we were still feeling high from the concert and completely undeterred by the thought of a six-hour drive. Amber stabbed a hole in the bottom of a Monster Energy to shotgun it, and we were on our way back home.

We were all exhausted. As LA disappeared in the rearview mirror, the pumping adrenaline that had fueled us the entire trip waned into barely more than a heartbeat. Skye passed out immediately and slept the entire ride back, while I kept falling in and out of consciousness as I struggled to keep my eyes open. I looked out the window of the thousands of stars above, reveling in their rare beauty, but even that wasn’t enough to keep me awake. Amber stopped a couple times to pee, and during the second stop—as we rolled up to a closed Circle K in Blythe and she was relegated to pissing on the side of the road—she turned back to us with heavy eyes and announced that if she didn’t get a break, she was going to veer off the road and kill us all. I tagged in and drove for about two-and-a-half hours from Blythe into the city of Phoenix.

I’ve never driven that late at night in the middle of nowhere before. It was eerie: when I looked in my mirrors, there was nothing but pure blackness, save for the haunted, white face of a passed-out Amber. Without a treeline to swallow up the headlights, their high beams reached into the horizon until the night beat them back. The dark, faceless silhouettes of mountains leered in the distance, blotting out my beautiful stars. The road just went: for miles and miles, for ever and ever. It would be enough to drive anyone insane, I’d imagine. I don’t think humans were meant to contemplate our miniscule existence on so imposing a scale.

Eventually, light began to glow like a halo above the mountains ahead. With waking sunlight, I could once again spot the shadowy shapes of saguaro, and I realized that we were almost home. The sun rose, and with it, Skye and Amber roused from their restless slumber. About thirty minutes out from home, Amber and I switched again to finish the journey.

Alas, despite stopping at a 24-hour Taco Bell, their breakfast didn’t start until 7 AM, so we were unable to cap our trip with another Crunchwrap. (It wouldn’t have stacked up, anyway.) We pulled up to my home at around 6:50, whereupon I promptly hit the couch and slept until 2 PM. Amber somehow made it to work, while Skye surrendered and wound up taking the day off.

I've still yet to unpack. Sorry, Zigzagoon.

The trip back and the accompanying exhaustion may have been brutal, but the trip was absolutely worth it, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. My other friends scolded us, said that the trip was ridiculous and irresponsible… but we’re young! Well, barely—but we’re adults who have free will. Why not live a little bit? I’m grateful to have had this amazing experience, and I’ll be able to tell the story of the 24 hour My Chemical Romance adventure for the rest of my days. Stories are what life is all about: I’ll do anything if I think it would make for a fun tale, and this trip definitely proved me right. Live free and have fun with the time you’re given. Don’t wait: you only hear the music when your heart begins to break.

Here’s to more adventures! So long and good night.