Summer Camp 08 (or how many idiots does it take to make a smoothie?) Finale

Before I move on to Saturday I forgot to mention Friday afternoon's tent problems. As you may recall, it was raining pretty hard. As you may also recall, our tent was a piece of shit. The result was that the top of our tent was kind of like a bath filling up and slowly caving the tent in. Luckily, being the geniuses we are, we tried to solve the problem by cutting a big hole in the tent and leaking the water into a giant garbage can. About an hour and 55 gallons of rain water later, though, we realized that this was not working either. To solve this problem we had to take these 10 foot metal poles and push the top of the tent up so as to push the water off. This basically worked, other than nailing a couple of next door's customers with an unexpected mid-rain storm shower, and since we didn't have any customers, we had a lot of time to focus on getting our tent through the storm.

Saturday and Sunday:

Saturday and Sunday were beautiful, warm, and sunny; perfect smoothie weather. Thank god. We were pretty slammed from 9 until 4 both days. We must have served a million smoothies in those hours, and while it was hard work, it felt good to know that we weren't going to be total failures. We almost sold all of the fruit we came with, people seemed to love our smoothies, and we learned a shit ton. We will definitely be less of a shit-show by Rothbury, and maybe we can actually make some money as well.

Music-wise, I was working a lot more, so I didn't see as much music. Lotus was playing near our booth and while I thought they started out a little choppy, they definitely kicked some ass. I'm really loving this band these days. I was especially pleased with "Suitcases & Sandwiches" near the end of the set. I caught all of Umphrey's Saturday set and thought that, while definitely a little tame, was pretty good nonetheless. I didn't think any of moe.'s sets were mind-blowing, but I though they were all above average. Sunday night's second set was probably the highlight moe.-wise. moe. really went all out on the lights this weekend, with Saturday and Sunday being up there with some of the best lights I've ever seen. George Clinton and P-Funk were also fun, but not something to write home about in my honest opinion.

We only had one more major problem before getting home on Monday night. When we were pulling the reefer truck out of the campgrounds on Monday morning the truck got stuck in the mud. Then, while we were trying to get the truck out of the mud, the truck ran out of gas. Eventually, though, we got out and back in one piece, and I'll only be eating fruit for the next week as opposed to the next two months.

Some other highlights or things I forgot to mention

-the barter economy is awesome. Our smoothies doubled as currency for art, food, drinks, toys, and various other forms of enlightenment. We even would give the security guards smoothies to let us through the gate without standing in line.

-the other vendors were super friendly and helpful. Special thanks to Oliver from Ali Baba's, Al from Pizza on Wheels, and Ed from the Coffee and Burrito booth. We learned so much from these guys over the course of the weekend it's not even funny.

-people on acid can't read the menu

I have to say it was overall a really cool experience, and I'm looking forward to doing it again. Going to a fest as a vendor is definitely different than going as a consumer, and like anything, has both its ups and downs.

Oh yea, the tent. We didn't execute it Office Space-style; instead we just dropped it off, told them it was a piece of shit, and drove off. While we technically only paid for half of the tent, those idiots got way more than they deserved.