We got to the concert venue early for a long-standing American tradition - tailgating. Tailgating is essentially drinking beer and grilling burgers and hotdogs out of the trunk of your car. Although it's not exactly legal to drink beer in parking lots, we got around it by drinking it out of plastic blue cups. Woo! High class right there! So anyway, we got to the Nissan Pavilion at about 3:30pm, ready for a fun afternoon with friends. We met up with some friends of Jeremy's - Bill and Kathleen (Bill works for the SS), and Keith (who works with Jeremy at CACI). One of the great things about tailgating is that everyone's there to have fun, and so you end up meeting so many random people that by the time the concert actually starts you have a dozen new friends when you started out with just three. By the time the concert began, I had become old friends of Gina and Jason (Jason's like a savant when it comes to numbers), Jill and Brandon (who have an adorable 1 and a half year old son), Josh and his girlfriend (Josh was the reigning champion of all beer games), and some guy in a blue checked shirt. After a long afternoon of beer and chips and hotdogs, and after staking out a prime viewing position on the lawn, much to our dismay it starts bucketing down rain. And I mean buckets and buckets and buckets. It was ridiculously wet and I was ridiculously cold. Luckily Jeremy and I had bought some stylish ponchos ($1.29 at Sports Authority) that actually kept us pretty dry. Good thing too, because I was wearing a white tank top, and everyone knows what happens when a white shirt gets wet! Still, I somehow managed to come home covered in mud (probably due to the mud-slide that some crazy kids beside us had made) and scratches (at one stage I was in the bushes - don't ask!).
Rain, mud and scratches aside, it was a great night. I had so much fun even though I didn't know any of the songs they played bar one, and seeing Jeremy so excited was priceless. We met some great people, drank a lot of Budweiser, and went home soaked and covered in mud. What a great night!!
Kathleen and I
Jill, Kathleen, Gina and me
Kathleen and Bill
Awww...we're so goodlooking!
Bill and Jeremy
And I'm posting this much to Jeremy's disgust because I think it's hilarious.
On a completely unrelated note, yesterday (Sunday) saw even more torrential downpours. The rain was so bad that roads were flooded all around the DC area. It took me 6 hours to get home from Jeremy's place! The highway I usually take home had been cut off by a huge mudslide (they reported as much as 5 feet of debris), so I was sitting in traffic that was dead still for hours. To make matters even worse, I had turned off the car and once traffic started moving again it wouldn't start. So here I am, at 10 o'clock at night, in the middle of the highway with a dead car! It was pretty terrible. What really made me mad was the fact that absolutely no-one stopped to help me. It's not as though people were actually going anywhere - traffic was crawling along - and yet people just went around me, gave me dirty looks, and continued on their way! Finally, a knight in shining armor (well, he was actually in a U-Haul rental truck) stopped and pushed my car off onto the shoulder. Much to my disgust, once I was out of the way I tried to start the car again and, what do you know? It started right up. So I was back in action. Not that it really did me any good to be moving again - we went about a mile and then were dead stopped again. Finally, (I'm talking about 3 hours later) I made it up to the site of the slide, when I was re-directed onto the other side of the highway going back in the direction from which I had just come!!! It just keeps getting worse...wait for it! So I figured I could go back to another highway that I knew would get me home and just take that route. So I'm driving along, through DC, in rain so heavy I was going a mere 20 miles an hour on the highway and I still couldn't see a thing. And then, to my utter dismay, the highway I was on was closed as well!! So we were re-directed yet again, except this time I was put onto some road I didn't know and had no real clue how to get home. So I just kept on driving, hoping to see a sign pointing me in the right direction. Finally I came upon a state highway that I knew, and managed to find my way slowly-but-surely back home. By this stage I'm utterly exhausted (especially after our big night out on Saturday), and can't wait to crawl into bed. Poor me! I got to bed at 3am. Good thing it's still rainy out today, so I can just laze around the house and not do a whole lot of anything.
If only I could've sent the rain your way! Then everyone would have been much much happier!
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