re: Educate me on buying tickets the day of the event

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But was it long and strange?

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Always.

I mean, we drove from Columbus to Vegas and back again. My friend Chris didn’t think his car could handle the mountains so we went south and took Route 66. We met some girls from Arkansas on the road and they wound up sharing our hotel room in Vegas with us. After we pulled off at some restaurant to meet, I took over driving their car the rest of the way. There was one little cutie that I had a little flirtation with but I decided to be faithful to my girlfriend back home. My relationship with that girlfriend didn’t last, she wasn’t entirely faithful to me, and in retrospect maybe I should’ve handled things differently.

On the way back home we stopped in a grocery in Tucumcari, NM and bought steaks and ears of corn. I bought dried habañero peppers (the package included the tilde) for the first time. Those were a revelation and that’s a whole other story.

Anyway, we wound up camping in an undeveloped campground just east of there where you just pull off the road into the desert. Every so often they’d have a slab of cement with a slanted roof above it. We set up our tent next to one of those. We scoured whatever scrub wood and brush we could and built a little fire with stones we gathered and arranged in a circle. My friend Mark, bass player for the local Dead/classic rock/jam band cover band Local Color, had brought along a grill grate and a little bag of charcoal where you just light the bag. Poof! Before long we had a little campfire on one side of the circle and glowing charcoal on the other. We had a tasty meal of steaks and corn on the cob.

That’s big sky country. In the distance we could see a storm approaching. It was a pretty cool sight. It didn’t hit us until after we were all asleep. It woke us up. It was torrential. And loud. But the tent held up and we stayed dry.

If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will?

Not in this case.

The next day we got pulled over in Texas because, allegedly, we failed to properly signal before a lane change. It was on an 8-lane divided highway that ran straight-as-an-arrow west-to-east for hundreds of miles. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that there were three longhair hippie people in a car with Ohio plates and covered with Dead stickers. We managed to socially engineer our way out of that situation. My friend Mark and I engaged the old cop while the young, eager, gung-ho cop who wanted to search the car took the driver Chris back to their patrol car to grill him. When it came time for Chris to sign permission for them to search the car (there may have been a tin of homegrown under the front seat,) Chris said, “I’m not signing anything.” The eager young cop came up to the older cop and said he wanted to search the car. The older cop said, “For what?!”

And with that we were on our way. No ticket, no nothing.