Coachella 2009 - The Review: Thursday

First of all, before I get into it, I would like to take this moment to petition anyone reading this post to finally sack up and make the trip out to California a go to Coachella with us.... You will not regret it.

Has Coachella weekend become my favorite weekend of the year?  Yes it has.... it most definitely has.  I don't even know where to begin.  I was thinking about doing another top ten list, but you guys are probably getting bored with those and I don't feel like paring down a weekend filled within countless moments of hilarity into just 10 events.  Plus I'm not in the mood to come up with creative/witty titles for each entry.  Instead, I'm getting chronological up in this piece.  Due to the length of this post and my inability to stay focused on something for more than one hour at a time, this will have to be done in installments, starting with Thursday.

Thursday:

Flanagan and I had a lot of business to take care of after work which led us on a tour of South Orange County before we finally picked up Clarke from the airport about 45 minutes late.  By business, I mean we had to leave our office in Anaheim and drive my Jetta to Mission Viejo to pick up some Purple Afro-berry.  Yes, that's what was called.  Then we had to head north to Irvine and swap my Jetta for Samatha's (Flanagan's girl) Lexus SUV.  After the swap, we headed back to Newport Beach and loaded the Lexus to the brim leaving barely enough room for Clarke to squeeze in the back seat after we finally picked him up from the airport.  Then we were off to the desert.  

Then there is the Walter situation.  For those of you who don't know, which is probably everyone reading this that hasn't been to Coachella, Walter is a friend of Clarke from when he lived in Tucson.  Walter has been a part of the Coachella experience for the past 3 years now and he is obsessed with Clarke.  Walter's obsession with Clarke is similar to a paparazzi's obsession with a superstar, which is why Clarke keeps in contact with him.  Clarke likes to feel like a superstar.  This is not debatable.  

2 Examples of Walter's obsession:

Coachella 2007:  Walter brings his own tent which he sets up but doesn't use once all weekend instead he opts to share sleeping quarters with Clarke in my shade tent.  Meanwhile, Flanagan and I are sharing my regular tent because neither one of us want to use Walter's tent.  It was so ridiculous.  I would love to have a whole tent to myself at Coachella.

Coachella 2008:  Clarke buys a clever T-shirt that spoofs Back 2 the Future.... It says Barack to the Future in the same font used in the movie.  The next day, Walter buys the exact same T-shirt.  How awesome is that?  First of all the T-shirt isn't that cool.  But more importantly, isn't there an unwritten rule that governs this sort of behavior?  Even if it was the coolest shirt ever, once one of your friends buys it, you cannot buy it.  Am I wrong?  

Anyways, back to the story of the day.  The trip to Coachella and back always seems to be an adventure for Walter.  2007, he was able to get a ride to Riverside, and we scooped him up on the way in and took him home.  2008, his plan was to take the bus there and then go with Sean Penn to New Orleans on some Katrina mission.  I'm not making this up.   Needless to say, that plan didn't pan out and he ended up just driving there on his own.  This year, he got involved with some carpool gig that was organized on the festival's website.  So he drove himself and 3 other people from LAX.  This included 2 girls, Brittany and Patricia, who flew in from Denver and 1 dude named Ari who is an Australian currently backpacking his way around the States.  These 3 people camped with us all weekend, there will be stories involving these characters in subsequent installments of The Review.   The four of them arrived well before us and picked out a perfect camping site.... not there's really a bad camping site, at least not in our experience so far.

  

While we were busy trying to get out of Orange County, Basford was having difficulties departing Tucson.  When the initial text messages came through updating us on his progress, or lack there of, I became worried.  See, Basford's attendance was vital to the overall success of the weekend.  Mainly because last year, Basford inherited my shade tent which is the single most important piece of camping equipment we have.  Shade at Coachella is such a commodity I pretty sure it can be exchange for sexual favors.  The night before the most important day of the year, Basford decides to leave the headlights on his car overnight and destroy his battery.  Haley really bailed him out and essentially saved the weekend for all by letting him use her car while she had to get by without a vehicle for the whole weekend.  

Despite our setbacks in Orange County and Basford's problems in Tucson, the four of us managed to arrive within minutes of each other for the second year in a row.  It is now approximately 11:00 pm and lot of people are still arriving and setting up camp.  We determine that the line to campgrounds is too long, so we stay in the parking lot and drink lots of beer for the next 2 hours.  It is now 1:00 am and we have a lot of shit to move.  This has become one of my favorite parts of the weekend.  See, the campgrounds are suppose to be alcohol free, which doesn't mean much other than most people just sneak in bottles or flasks in addition to their drugs of choice.  Since our drug of choice is beer, this presents a challenge.  The last couple years, we were able to smuggle in a couple cases by strategically concealing cans of beer within our camping equipment.  It reminds me of being in high school and sneaking beer past the parents.  This year, I borrowed a 4-wheeled dolly from work to help us move our stuff in which led to Basford and I looking making fools out of ourselves as we get the wheels stuck in the sand and being laughed at by fellow campers.  All-in-all, the dolly worked fine once we discovered the hard ground.   We literally had 20 or so objects stacked on this dolly as we wheeled up to the checkpoint.  Security is suppose to check everyone's belongings for contraband. Our drunk logic was that we would have too much stuff so that we would either a) be granted a free pass because the security would be to lazy to search it all or b) be brought to a separate search area.  It was the latter.   When we rolled up to the gate with that thing, the security guard took us to the side and started searching item by item.  The good thing about this was that security was so distracted, Clarke and Flanagan rolled 2 coolers full of beer in without being searched at all.  The bad thing is, we had beer on the dolly, 2 bags of purple afro-berry (yes, that's what's called) and a bubbler.   The security guard only took the bubbler.... a small price to pay for the amount of contraband we were able to get in.

Now it's time to set up our tents... which is typically easy, except this year we didn't have the instructions for the shade tent.  The shade tent is a tricky apparatus if you don't have the instructions but we were able to figure it out.  This accomplishment is one of those things which we tend to give ourselves way more credit that what is due.   After we got the shade tent up, you would have thought we just discovered a cure for cancer.  Lot's of congratulations for a simple task... but when performed by idiots, gets blown way out of proportion.  By now, I'm sure it's like 4:00 am and we shoot the shit for a little while longer before finally calling it a night as sun started to rise.....

To be continued....