Watershed 2013: July 31-Aug 5

AKA Awesomeness...but not as much awesomeness as last year.

But I still can't complain about seeing Thompson Square (3rd time) & Luke Bryan Friday night, Kip Moore & Toby Keith Saturday night and Lee Brice, Chris Young & Brad Paisley Sunday night. We really lucked in on seeing Chris Young because now a couple weeks later he's been in the hospital and he actually missed shows due to an infection. Including Rockin' River Fest in Mission.

Nobody was as good as Blake Shelton (or Dierks Bentley) last year. But they were all good in their own way. I can't say which is my favourite because they all had very very different shows.

What I will complain about is Blackberry Smoke & Shooter Jennings. We had to see the former perform twice, which almost ruined the afternoon because they were awful. And the only thing worse than listening to someone awful, is doing it twice. Then there was Jennings. So caught up on Nashville outlawing his Daddy 4000 years ago that he's anti everything that is good about music and instead just likes to stand up and curse down everything that people like about country music. From the yelling and the swearing, it was just like a vendetta of a show. Just awful.

It was a long adventure to get to the Gorge Amphitheatre.

-1 hr to ferry
-1+ hr wait for ferry
-2 hrs on ferry
-0.5 hr to border
-2 hrs south
-3 hrs east

This brings you to the absolute middle of nowhere. You don't fully understand what that means until you actually get there. On that three hour drive east, you pass hardly any people, cars and maybe 3 towns during the first 2 hours.

We went along Highway 2 (I think) that takes you through Stevens Pass to get there. But we came back I-90 which we hadn't taken at all last year. We got to stop on the hill overlooking the Columbia River and it is a pretty impressive sight to see. One of the artists performing last year (I can't remember who. Maybe Johnny Reid?) Described it as a gauge through the earth.

Some other noteworthy performances were Chase Rice (I want to see more of him in the future), Chris Cagle (probably the performance of the weekend - he got a standing ovation, something nobody else got this year or last year), and Neal Mccoy (who I was worried about because he seemed old and the ones last year that were old were not really with it, but he was entertaining and funny and really played to the crowd. A good surprise).

It was a bit worrisome at times because a few days before we left we found out that the whole west side of the river was engulfed by a 70 square mile wildfire that was not contained at all. We were on the east side of the river and the river valley is so huge the fire would never jump it, but we were worried about smoke. Luckily we only had a bit of haze as the fire had moved south and the wind was blowing in the right direction.

Then there was the thunderstorms. We hit an amazing one going through Wenatchee. High cloud and sun when we went into Safeway. Complete blackness and rain drops bigger than I've ever seen before 20 minutes later when we came out. We thought we were going to be spending the night in the truck it was so bad and the storm was moving in the direction we were headed. But we lucked in. Until Sunday night at least. The storm started on the other side of the river and we watched the fork lighting hit (something I've never seen before) and it hovered over there for a while, but then it moved our way. I was completely convinced that we weren't going to get to see the last show or two. At the last moment the storm changed course and moved along the ridge where the campsites were, instead of passing over the amphitheatre. But when we got back to the campsite there were tents in places tents shouldn't be and everyones pop up tents for shade were missing their canvases. We got to out site and not only was the cover gone, but so were our coolers, chairs and everything we left sitting out. We thought someone had gone through and stolen our stuff. Turns out the guys next to us had come back to camp just at the right time and saw that the wind had bent the metal on the tent and they had pulled the cover off and tucked everything in our tent or under our vehicle. I can't imagine what the wind must have been like there. Actually no, I can. One word: Rotterdam. I can imagine anything now.

So it was easy packing up the next morning as the guy next door had pretty much gathered everything up for us. We were just lucky that they didn't like Lee Brice and so they headed back for awhile. Otherwise the tent probably would have blown right into the truck.

 Columbia River (and sandbar where all the boats go) from the Amphitheatre

 The Gorge Amphitheatre 

  The Gorge Amphitheatre 

 Watershed Sunset (with thunderclouds and wildfire smoke)

 Path to see the River

 Landscape around the Columbia River

Columbia River

*Not my photo-Taken by the organizers*

The big round blob that takes up all the space is the campsites. The little grass patch on the far right side in the centre is the amphitheatre grass. Just some perspective on the mass size of this.

 *Not my photo-Taken by the organizers*

A closer up version of the campsite

*Not my photo-Taken by the organizers*

View from the stage

It Was Time To Write Again

Time to blog again and not as an anonymous food blogger either (which I have been neglecting for the past while). For 48 straight days, I posted to a travel blog while I backpacked through Europe. For some reason, people read every day. I don't know why. All I remember from that trip is being very cold and spending every other day on a train. But I guess that was interesting enough if you weren't actually freezing your butt off on a train that you weren't sure if it was actually going where you wanted it to go. Fun!

But I got home and people said, you need to keep blogging. All I could think was you really don't want to read about my day-to-day life. It's boring. I wake up, I go to work, I come home, spend the night in the kitchen and go to bed, then repeat. Over and over again. So not exciting.

It's been several months since I've been back. Actually it's hard to believe it's been almost four months now. But I've come to realize in those four months that I do do the odd interesting thing. In those months there's been a couple of things I'd call interesting, entertaining and worth writing about. So hence this blog. Posts will be infrequent at best because that's how often interesting things happen, but sometimes they're worth mentioning. Actually, typically when they're worth mentioning, they are really good. So stay tuned for the fun bits and the milestones.