One short month ago, I had never been to such major music festival. Now I have been to and performed at three of them.

We hit "Summer Camp" in Chillicothe, Illinois, "Mountain Jam" in Hunter, New York, and "Wakarusa" in Mulberry Mountain, Arkansas back to back over the course of three weeks.

All I can say is ... wow.


Kevin here. Peacekeeper just got back from the first leg of our summer tour, and in the following series of blogs, I'm going to do my damnedest to recount to you what just happened.

 PART 1: LAUNCHING THE SHIP



We left Chicago Tuesday May 19th in the late afternoon. We were supposed to leave in the early afternoon, or even noon itself, but, as we were soon to discover things tend to run a little late when you're traveling with three vehicles and three trailers.



I can't quite remember what that first bit of vehicular trouble was, although I know Jack had to replace a few fuses in his car to get the trailer lights to work. But after some fretting and sweating, all three cars were good to go.



Here's us arriving at the campsite in Chillicothe, IL. We pulled in around midnight to the Three Sisters Park that hosts Summer Camp, and despite our delays we were still some of the very first to arrive. The concert goers didn't start showing up until Thursday, and even the vendors didn't start arriving until Wednesday afternoon, so when we pulled into the park, what we found was a giant dark empty field.

As odd as it may sound, after a long dark winter in the concrete jungle of Chicago, this was one of the most exciting giant empty fields I had ever seen.

It had been a full long day of packing, auto maintenance and driving, so we and the restaurant crew celebrated our arrival by cracking open a twelve pack of Budweiser and going to town on it in the dark. That's around the time I snapped the photo above.



The next day when we woke up, ever so slightly hung over, it was time to unload the trailers and set up the two tents: one for the restaurant and one for us rockers.

At this point I suppose I should breakdown how this whole tour thing came to be.

(to be continued in "PART 2: HOW WE HIT THE ROAD WITH ED"...)