RockFest, anyone?
Don't ask why Sarah and I went halfway across the country to attend a rock festival because we have no real answer. When people ask us, we mostly look at each other and say, "Uh..."
Let's be real for a second. How could we not have gone to this amazing festival? First of all, there were bands like Rob Zombie, Avenged Sevenfold, Slayer, Volbeat, Shinedown, the list goes on and on and on. Believe me, it was four days of absolute bliss. At least I thought it was going to be.
So everyone knows: I'm not a camping person. I wouldn't say I was miserable, but I definitely wasn't happy. I was a little better when I gave up on trying to look like a decent human being and skipped daily showers since it was a long, uphill walk to the communal showers where I found a used band-aid in my stall and someone else yelled there was a bloody tampon in theirs. It got even better when I stopped trying to hide the fact that I poop because there were literal piles of shit in the port-o-potties. Let me tell you, when you see shit smeared across the port stall, you kind of lose any hope that you will make it out of it all unscathed.
We got there early in order to be considered to win backstages passes. We, of course, didn't win shit. However, we did win the absolutely amazing thunderstorm package. Bad storms were making their way in and all we had was a discount tent and a car. I remember waking up around 1 or 2 from loud rumbles of thunder in the distance. I shuffled on my air mattress and tried to squint over at Sarah. I wasn't sure if she was awake or asleep, but I was already bugging out. How the fuck are we supposed to survive these bad storms in a god damn tent?
Fast forward about an hour and the rain is pelting our tent with such power that you'd think it was hailing. Sarah moves around on her mattress and I see her sit up and look at me.
"We should run for the car." She started to grab her stuff. Phone, speaker, anything electronic she had in there. I grabbed my phone and my damn stuffed animal. A bright burst of lighting went across the sky simultaneous with the loudest clap of thunder I heard up until that time (not long after that I almost shit myself out in a different thunderstorm but that's a different story). Sarah probably saw my face was like:
but I didn't have time to care what Sarah was seeing. I was about to bolt to the car as fast as my short little legs could take me. I stood outside the tent under the lowered canopy waiting for Sarah to close the tent and get alongside me so I didn't just ditch her (on the real, I'd ditch ANYONE if it was something more serious like a bear or Sasquatch I don't know.) Our little god damn blow up pool was sagging now with all the excess water building up, it was bound to break any minute now and it pretty much did the next morning.
We get in her car dripping wet head to toe from that short run from the tent to the car. We start laughing. Kind of manically.
"Well, this is it!" I laughed and wiped water off my face, pushing my hair out of the way.
"Probably for the night, look at the radar." Sarah showed me her phone and pointed to a spot on the map, "This is us." A small dot in the middle of a giant storm-colored mess. We looked at each other and laughed again.
In the morning, we went into the tent and, wouldn't you know it, the entire thing was soaked. Mostly my side cause that's just my luck. I had two books in there that were ruined. My mattress and sheets were beyond soaked. So we did the only thing we could think.
We laid our mattresses out in the sun and hung our sheets all over the canopy and across her car like the most white-trash thing you've ever seen. We drank some cans of Mike's Hard Lemonade and sat by our deflating pool as new people drove in and stared.
I wish we had a sign that said "Jersey" cause it would have explained a whole hell of a lot.
