Waterlogged at Waterloo!

This weekend, we took Sugaree down to Carson Creek Ranch in Austin for the first Waterloo Festival, which featured three nights of String Cheese Incident, Oteil & Friends, Everyone Orchestra, Joe Russo's Almost Dead (JRAD), Leftover Salmon, Railroad Earth, Deadeye, The Motet and others.  We stayed in Sugaree in the camping area, which was really sweet, as we could come and go from the show as we pleased and make stops back at the bus for food when we wanted to.  The festival was a small, but fervent crowd..excited for some great jam music.  It was one of the more poorly organized festivals we have attended, but hopefully they will work out the kinks by next year and it will continue.

It was fun getting to spend time with our friends, Marty and Jim, Patrick, Michael, John and Kari, Rachel and Eric, CJ and Sarah, Audra, Mike and Zach, Chris, Drew, Scott, Mason, Neely, Dan, Pug Dog and Julianne, and made some new friends from Houston, Austin, Canada, New Braunfels, Alice, TX and Baltimore.

Late Saturday night, the rains started and continued to gain strength throughout the night.  By Sunday morning, there was 3-5 inches of rain on the saturated, muddy grounds and it was a mess.  Lucky for us, we had rain gear and Kelly had cute galoshes that she bought two years ago after we got rained out at Jazz Fest in N'awlin's and she hadn't yet worn them.  I had just bought a pair of waterproof boots, so I was good to go as well.  It was great being able to slosh around and dance with abandon in the muddy slerm without getting all wet and gross.  I felt sorry for those who wore flip flops that stuck in the mud at each step.

The highlight for us was JRAD (or Joe Russo's Almost Dead).  They play Dead music with all kinds of fun twists, turns and surprises.  It was good to see Oteil and his band play, though we all agreed that it was highly likely they had not ever rehearsed and mostly played covers.  Jeff Chimenti played keys, so it was cool to see two of our Dead & Company brethren again.  The Everyone Orchestra was a lot of fun too, and they played on the stage down by the river.  There were about 9 or 10 of them, just getting down and they were a blast to see.

During the day Sunday and into the night, we saw RV's getting towed out of the mud and I wondered how Sugaree would fare getting out of there on Monday morning.  As we pulled out this morning, we got stuck and backed up and tried again, but got stuck again.  We gathered all the mojo we could, and on our third try, she pulled through, wheels slippin' and slidin' and mud flying, and she cruised on up the hill and out of the venue!  We look forward to seeing the new and improved Waterloo Festival next year!

Mama, mama, many worlds I've come since I first left home...

Home, sweet home!  We got home from our trip on Tuesday and were greeted with hell-like temperatures in the 107-109 degree range.  To compound matters, we are renovating our home and the guys cut our AC lines, so we have been without AC downstairs for 6 days now, so the whole house is sweltering.  We would've left and gone to the lake, but they took our fence down between us and our neighbors, and we need to see that project through to make sure they finish.  Enough bitching out of me...let's talk about what I'm grateful for!

I'm grateful to live in this awesome country, where even though we have a circus clown for a president, we have the most beautiful landscapes to discover and the most interesting people to meet.  On this trip, we went exactly 7,000 miles door-to-door and explored ten states.  We spent a couple days in Jackson Hole, WY, three days in Yellowstone National Park, whose beauty is indescribable, hung out in the quaint waterside town of Coeur d'Alene, ID, saw Dead & Company shows at The Gorge, Autzen Stadium in Eugene, OR, Isleta Amphitheatre in Albuquerque and the two shows to wrap up the tour at Folsom Field in Boulder.  We got to explore Pikes Market in Seattle, the oldest continuously operating fish market in the country, went to Vashon Island to see Kelly's sister Sherri and her son, Matt and his sweet fiancé, Alyce, fell in love with Oregon, drove through wildfires in Northern California.  We got to enjoy Dylan's 19th birthday in Las Vegas, which was really cool.  After being warned not to drive through Teton Pass, we drove right through it (at 20 miles an hour!).  We spent a good amount of time driving along The Continental Divide.  We saw breathtakingly beautiful mountains, lakes, waterfalls, hot springs, geysers, wild bear, buffalos, caribou, bald eagles and the Pacific Ocean.  We got to hang with Bill Walton in Sugaree.  We met some of the biggest characters you can imagine and we got to spend fantastic quality family time.

I'm grateful that all of our kids are happy and healthy and enjoy spending time with us.  We know that jobs, marriage, college, etc will all come into play at some point, so we are full of gratitude for the quality time we get to spend as a family.  Avery was in Thailand for most of this trip, but we got to meet her in Albuquerque, so that was a great ending to a terrific trip that we will all remember forever.  We are also thankful to Sugaree for making the entire 7,000 mile journey without any real issues (other than no headlights from Northern Oregon to home, so we just avoided driving at night). This brings Sugaree's total to 40,000 miles since we bought her three and a half years ago and 40 states and a little bit of Canada.  The experience of being able to jump onboard with my family and "sail" across America is liberating and exciting.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, this entire trip seemed to be like driving along the Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion as doors opened for us everywhere we turned.  We discovered new states that we knew little to nothing about...Idaho and Oregon as a couple examples.