To get caught up, I'm going to do a quick round-up of day two of the hippie music festival, AND the story of the time I sat in a park in Charlottesville for like six hours because I'm basically the best person ever. So get excited.
I awoke Friday morning of said music festival not really at all refreshed or well-rested, but still ready to take on the day. The night had not been too noisy, though I had set my tent and sleeping bag up on a hill in such a way that comfortable sleeping was pretty impossible. I used the bottles of water I'd stolen from the (extremely meager) press tent the night before brush my teeth and wash my face, navigated my contact lenses into my eyes and set off down the mountain.
Barrett was also on his way into the festival, having been sent out to check in on the traffic situation, EMS calls, etc. I told him I'd meet him in front of the stage so he could help me work on my camping story, since I was behind the schedule I wanted to be on and was hoping to finish the story by noon.
Here is the thing about my mood at this point that you need to understand for the next part of this tale. It was not the most positive of moods. I had spent five hours the previous day in a parking lot of anarchistic (is that a word?) drunken humanity only to be told when I finally made my way into the festival and met up with another reporter that all that could have been avoided if I had had a slightly different media pass and been a little more insistent with it.
So as I approached the security checkpoint to enter the concert venue area and a man in a yellow vest snottily informed me, "Venue's closed, ma'am," I WAS NOT HAVING IT.
"I. Am. With. The. MEDIA," I hissed at the fellow, waving my camo wristband in front of him as authoritatively as I could. He hesitated for a second and stepped aside - a wise decision, as I was pretty much ready to punch anyone who told me to wait anywhere in the face.
Barrett and I connected and then immediately left the stage area, though, so I guess all my weight throwing around was unnecessary, but whatever. I spent about an hour roaming the grounds, chatting with people who had interesting setups or just seemed friendly, and this is what I churned out: http://www.newsadvance.com/news/local/article_9cee6d00-1823-11e3-a7bf-001a4bcf6878.html.
The rest of my day involved hiking back up the mountain to my tent and pretty much feeling like death. By about 2 p.m., when I planned to leave, I was super dehydrated and exhausted and chose to spend about 15 minutes laying on the ground while Barrett packed up my stuff for me. It was awesome.
The rest of the weekend was much less eventful, up until Sunday, the day of both Barrett's birth and his intense challenge thing he did. Perhaps if his "after action review" he just wrote (and I did a killer job of editing, because I'm awesome) gets posted on the interwebz I'll link to it here, but suffice it to say he spent 12 hours doing a lot of things (pushups, carrying bricks, more pushups, carrying telephone poles) that are difficult and I'd rather not do.
I spent about four hours (from 9 a.m., the earliest time the challenge was expected to end, to 1 p.m., the time it actually did end) creepily hanging out in a park in Charlottesville, literally sitting near a homeless man drinking liquor out of a paper bag.
Then I bought Barrett lunch, because, as noted: I am the best.
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