Folkfest 2008 Day 4 (Friday)

I woke up after a great night sleep. I must have gotten 10 hours of great sleep. I didn’t know at the time but this would probably be the last night I would get a decent night sleep. But after a good night sleep I was all set and ready to go to volunteer.

11 hours of volunteering seemed tough, and it was. First 5 hours they had me on my feet running around. Second half of my shift they had me handling the exit. This is where my buddy Scott Wachal played a funny joke on me. It wasn’t funny at the time but in retrospect it was funny. I don’t want to go into too much because it may jeopardize his chances of getting volunteer work the following year.

I finished at about 10:00. Spirits were still very high. We walked back to the tents. Tonight was the night we were going to experience Folkfest. A group of us all got together and had a great conversation. When I got back to the campsite I noticed that my tent was done. Because it was so dark I had decided to leave it down and deal with it in the morning. I knew this was going to be an all nighter anyways. It wasn’t too much later that we all decided to do Shinanigans *. Must have been around 11:00 o’clock or so. After that we all sat around the fire talking, giggling and having a great time.

I was looking down at pope’s hill and they had a fire show going on. I tried to gather a group of people to go with me, but I couldn’t. So I went on my travels all alone. Somehow I found myself following some people to the fire show. They jumped a plastic fence to get close to it. I watched the show for about 10 minutes. It was so intense I had to get out of there. I was seeing more then what the show had to offer and I was freaking out a bit.

I turned around and realized that the fence that I had jumped earlier was not as easy to get over anymore. I tried to jump it a few times with no luck. This is about the time I started to panic a bit. Finally this huge line backer type guy was leaving the crowd. He just drove through the crowd creating the path for me to follow.

After the panic I had experienced I decided to just go back to the fire. On my way back I saw a beautiful sight, The Northern Lights. It’s sort of funny because Darby Jones was talking about the northern lights earlier on. He was hoping that we would get to see the Northern Lights. We did. I raced back to the fire and pulled everyone away to look at how beautiful it really was. I don’t know if the Northern Lights were real or if they were related to the Shinanigans we took. It didn’t matter because my mind thought they were real.

I find myself back at the fire just chilling. We had some great laughs around the fire. It felt like there were moments where we were laughing for more than 10 minutes straight because of nothing. Just random bouts of laughter.

It was at this point that Anthony was trying to pull me away from the fire. He was trying to pull me away because this pretty lady was coercing him to roll down the hill. He did the same to me. We raced to the hill. Just the 3 of us rolled down. This is where things became weird. By the time we reached the bottom I was pretty dizzy. I saw Anthony but the girl had disappeared and in her place to other women had appeared. These girls had a million questions for us. What are you doing, how are you feeling, what have you done tonight. I felt like I was being backed into a corner and because I was still a little dizzy from the roll so I didn’t giving out too much information.

It didn’t take long for those girls to leave once they realize that we were on crazy Shinanigans. We went up Popes hill this time and just sort of looked around. I remember having a great time being with Anthony but I don’t remember much of the details. I do remember us walking back to the fire a short while later.

The fire was great again. Lots of great laughs. I love being on Shinanigans because it feels like I am the center of attention sometimes. It’s a good feeling especially while on Shinanigans.

The sun started to come up and the effects were wearing off. I went back to my tent but because of the winds I found it very hard to put up my tent. I had to call Scott Wachal over to help. He did help me put it up and I tried to retire for the night. It was probably around 6:00. I got into my tent and it stayed up for no more then 15 minutes before it collapsed. Every time I put it up the huge windows would not knock it back down.

I finally gave up and decided to try to sleep in the collapsed tent. Another 15 minutes passed and it started to drizzle. I realized there was no way I would fall asleep as long as it was drizzling. So I got up out of the tent and decided to go for a walk.

For the purpose of limiting the length of this day it will end here because everything that happens after this point is like a whole new day. Stay tuned for day 5. It’s depressing boring and sad. I will do my best to dress it up though.

* We all decided that we could not speak of what we were doing that night. So we decided on the facebook approved name of shinanigans. I won’t tell you what Shinanigans means however I may reference it a few times throughout the rest of this article.