Arriving at the Fest, I was honestly not sure that I was going to make it more than one day.  I had never seen so many people in my life, or such chaos.  We got there and immediately looked for the people from our church who were running a coffeehouse at the Main Stage.  We talked to them briefly, but it was obvious that they were too busy to deal with the niceties of small talk.  This was a little off-putting for me, as these were the only people here in the entire world that I knew at the Fest.  I now didn’t know what I was going to do for socialization while here.  

We drove slowly away trying to find Camp Tastyfresh, and parked.  While we were looking over the field where the big white tent with UG was to see if anyone was there, there is a loud hissing coming out of our front tire.  “Oh no!  It’s going flat!  Well at least it happened here, it could have been anywhere along the road,” Jeremy and I both say to each other.  Jeremy starts hauling all of our stuff out of the back and onto the dirt road to get to the patch kit and the air compressor.   The compressor happens to not work, so he fixes that quickly before patching and filling up the tire.  We later learn that these minor or not so minor car problems pretty much happened to everyone along the way somewhere.  

After the tire is fixed, we drive on to the Dance Barn, still looking for all the people we had met through Tastyfresh.  Once we find the Barn we stop our vehicle, this time not getting a flat, and Jeremy looks around saying this is a great spot to camp.  I’m looking at him like he is going crazy, as all I can hear is the very loud whirring of the Refrigerator truck that is right in front of the spot.  We ask the people next to us if this is somewhere that you can officially camp, and they say that they think so.  Is there anything at the Fest that is actually official or not? We happen to get to know these neighbors later on.

We go into the Dance Barn and meet a bunch of the Jesus People.  All of the chaos is starting to get to me even more at this point.  We then proceed to set up our campsite for the next six hours.  Yes, I did say six.  We have never camped for this long, and Jeremy wants to do it right.  He sets up the tent and proceeds to put his light trusses up as props for the tarps to go on.  We, though, soon realize that we are in need of three bolts for the truss.  I had met some Jesus People earlier in the day, and they happen to come by again.  I ask the husband, who just happens to be an electrician, if he has three bolts.  He asks what size.  I am not sure what size we told him, but he comes back five minutes later with three bolts that are the right widths but happen to be about 6 inches long.  This is probably even a lot faster than we would have been able to get them at home.  Jeremy puts them in and they fit, and he just happens to have a hacksaw to saw them to the right length with.  We then are realizing that it is getting late and we have not eaten, the campsite of four next to us just happen to bring over some fish and potatoes that they had brought from traveling through Utah.  As we are eating, we are talking about what we need for next year to make it a better “refugee” camping experience.  

That night, really late, after I have gone to bed, the Club Worship Posse shows up.  They tell Jeremy that they are a lot later than they had anticipated, as their 15-passenger van’s transmission went out two hours into the trip.  They ended up having to rent a van on a Sunday when the car rental place was actually not even open.  When they start setting up they come to realize that their 10-person tent that they had packed was actually a two-person tent, so one of their guys goes 30 miles to Wal-Mart to get a tent.  

Then in the middle of this first night a pretty loud storm hits, and Jeremy comes into the tent trying to wake me up and get me to safety.  I, though, think that he is trying to get me to move stuff to dry ground, and I tell him in my half-sleep that I am not moving.  This is only one day, but it pretty much sums up the whole fest.  I was stretched way out of my comfort zone and couldn’t hardly stand it, and I’m already making plans to go back next year and meet up with all the cool people I met.  I was really scared about coming because I know how uncool I actually am, but never felt that people were looking at me in that way when I got there.  I would recommend Cornerstone Festival and the Dance Barn to anyone that I meet in this upcoming year, as I anxiously wait to start this all over again at next year‘s Cornerstone.