Wind Gap 2009
I’ve been off the internet since Friday morning, when Sam and I left for the 2009 Wind Gap Bluegrass Festival, which is about when my camera decided it wanted to die. So I don’t have much of anything other than shots my buddy Nik took.
Last week, i dropped a few more bucks than i wanted to on a new tent: the $79.00 model was out of stock, so I grabbed a giant that promised to sleep 9: that’s room for me, my kid and girlfriend (who didn’t make it this time), and my bass and guitar. Plus, the tent had a nifty closet space set aside where we could store all our clothes.
Unfortunately, the poor prisoner of the Chinese slave labor camp tasked with making my tent must have been having a bad day: one of the four tent poles didn’t match its mate, and as a result the rain fly didn’t fit properly. The tent was big enough to keep Sam out of the line of fire, but once the rain came down (as it did, in buckets, on Saturday morning and Saturday night), everything else got soaked and filled with mud.
We also ended up at a new campsite than the one we’ve occupied for the past five or six years. The old site was just north of the little creek that winds through Mountain View Park. It’s convenient to our Grillbilly family, but has the disadvantage of being the direct glare of the morning sun. When you’ve been up all night playing music and swilling beer, that’s a recipe for a dehydration headache and a wicked hangover.
This year, that area was taken up, forcing us across the stream where I think I may have found a much better site. We were still along the creek, but sheltered from the sun (and some of the rain) by tall trees. Because of the rain, we had to navigate around a moat, but we were on high ground: our roof may have leaked, but nothing came up through the floor. One of the reasons we camp with the Grillbillies is because of the cooking, but our new neighbors were no no pikers in the area either. Together, we served up heaping piles of steak, salad, pretty much anything you could wrap your mouth around. [If my camera hadn't died, this is where'd you see photos of Jay, Liz, Dave, Lauren, and the rest.]
As usual, I didn’t see any of the bands (although I REALLY wanted to check out Larry Gillis’s show). Sam has a hard time sitting through entire sets of music, and he’s still a little too young for me to let him run free. That said, I tried my best to do a balancing act between “good dad who lets his growing son have some unsupervised freedom” and “bad dad whose kid hurt himself”. Basically, I allowed him to play in the shallow end of the creek with the kids from the Doerfel Family, who were building a dam, without hovering over him like a helicopter.
Sam also got a chance to pick with grownups: I finally got his banjo set up a few weeks ago, and even though it’s a little big for him, my friend Michele showed him how to sit it in his lap and strum it properly. We picked a bit through a few basic songs that didn’t require him to fret the notes, and for a 5-year-old who’s never played before, he wasn’t half bad! He got into the spirit a bit later as well with Ian and Eric, two friends of mine from Philly who came up for the weekend. Later he told me he’s going to practice his banjo so he can play at OATS next month.
Eric
Ian
Friday was a beautiful day, but when the rain came on Saturday, it was relentless. Mud everywhere, rain coming down so thick you couldn’t even see where you were going. I finally found my guys under a huge tarp up the hill, where i could see my tent and get back to it in case Sam had any trouble.
He didn’t of course. The kid could sleep through an atomic bomb.
here’s me, looking none the worse for wear after 3 days in the woods.
