Life among the hippies...

Sorry it's taken so long for me to get to this entry, one of my few real adventures. It hasn't been a busy week or anything, I just have not felt myself struck by the blogging muse.

But I hear the people are demanding more pithiness from me, so here goes.

Gather round, dear readers, and you'll hear the tale of the longest, most frustrating, strangest, most exhausting and occasionally pretty cool 24 hours of my life: the time I camped at a hippie music festival for work.

I was pulled into the coverage team for this music festival because one of my main skills is writing quickly and it seemed that I'd be a helpful person to have around for updates. But in one of the planning meetings for the event, when it became clear that no one was planning to camp, I felt like we were missing out an important coverage opportunity.

And so, filled with trepidation, I volunteered to be that person.

Prepped with a small two-person tent I borrowed from Barrett, a z-rest (also borrowed from Barrett) and a sleeping bag (you can guess where I got it), along with my laptop, a sweatshirt and a change of clothes, I set out for said festival around midday one sunny Thursday.

I know there would be significant traffic delays, but foolishly believed by going later I could actually game the system, coming at a point where everyone who was there with the purpose of seeing the band would already have made it in.

I was wrong.

After an hour's drive out to the festival site, I spent approximately five hours in the impromptu waiting area/parking lot created out of what was once meant to be a seven-lane entrance. It was instead about 15-20 lanes, as people would see their lane was not moving and simply drive farther to the right, figuring they could sneak around others and worm their way in.

Because, you see, people are terrible. The volunteers responsible for directing traffic in this section had apparently quit, so it was essentially anarchy. Peaceful anarchy, for the most part, complete with bubbles and guitars and people not wearing shirts and so, so many beers.

Unfortunately for me, I was working, alone and had no beers. So instead I ate an entire box of fruit snacks, drank three Gatorade and tweeted. A lot. If you don't follow my twitter, you are missing out. (E_kennedy68)

I also like, did my job, sending in updates about some of the madness, which helped contribute to a massively read story, so that was cool.

After about four hours of this insanity, people started to get a bit tense. (Many of them had been there even longer than I had, the longest wait I heard was about eight hours.) Turns out, these 15 lanes of traffic didn't just have to merge down to seven lanes to get searched, but INSTEAD TO TWO. Then they merged back out to seven searching stations. But in order to cross this little road thingie, you had to be merged down to two lanes (with the help of guards on horseback) and then split back up.

Even if the original seven-lane system had help up, this would have been torturous. In the process of the merging down I finally yelled at this one girl who totally pretended she had some authority in order to get a bunch of cars to cut me off, but then she helped me because of her intense guilt. So that was okay.

I'm getting kind of rambly and losing some pith, plus I've reached a natural stopping point. So I'll be back soon (maybe over the weekend, if not definitely Monday) to fill you in on what happened when I actually made it into the festival, and how I survived without fruit snacks.