Friday August 13 2004 – After being assed out for about 14 hours, I finally awoke at 4:00 PM on Friday feeling pretty fresh. Everybody else was looking pretty exhausted, but the general consensus of the group seemed to be that this last night would be easy to get through because all you had to know was that you would be seeing Phish in 24 hours.

Pretty soon the rain came back again and you can tell by the looks on everybody's faces that everyone had had enough of this shit. Once again around 5:30 everyone started grabbing multiple garbage and began to suit up for the another night of soggy parking.

As we hopped into the back of the pickup after dinner,  the rain started to come down harder. We drove through the heart of the festival on our way to our parking spot and it looked like some kind of gigantic insane carnival. We were dropped off with no specific instructions, and our boss just told us "stay here for awile." As soon as the boss drove off I saw that there was going to be a bizarre play going on in a huge tent across the street from us. I had absolutely no will to stay outside and get soaked so me and Dave immediately took a seat in the tent.

I felt good to be warm and dry for once. The play was called "The Mask" and was performed by a bunch of communal religious freaks. It was performed by people wearing these ridiculous reptile masks, and the moral of it was to set yourself apart from the "crowd," and to be your own person. It was definitely one the strangest things I have ever witnessed. After the play was over one of the performers told us to stick around for some traditional Israeli dancing, Dave and I knew  it was time to leave.

The rain had finally stopped. There was a different feeling in the air now and  people spirit's were boosted. Dave and I saw that there were few parkers around to be seen, and the ones who were around weren't doing shit so we decided to take off our vests, and turn off our glow sticks and lose our selves in the festival. Everywhere you looked there was something to keep you entertained. Whether it was t-shirt stands or bong shops, art displays or a Phish cover band playing in a tent, there was always something to keep your mind occupied. Dave and I wandered around for about five hours without even thinking about our obligations to the parking crew.

We finally ran into Mike and Blatts at about 2 A.M. after losing them earlier in the night because they did not want to see the play. They had been basically doing the same shit as us. We all decided that maybe we should go back and work. We went back to the original location that we were dropped off at, and saw that Elyse was there sitting in a chair directing traffic. Elyse had only brought sandals for footwear to Coventry. This proved to be a big mistake because Thursday night she had worn no shoes to work, and her feet became inflamed and it was painful for her to even stand. So this night she had put plastic bags over her bare feet and duct taped them tight. After no longer being able to take the pain she was brought to the medic and was diagnosed with a case of "trench foot."

At about 3 A.M. we were transported to another location far away from the venue and the main festival grounds. We knew as soon as we arrived that this was probably the worst place to camp in the whole festival. The people who were coming in had been waiting in traffic for about 30 hours, not including wherever they had previously driven from. If you saw a lisence plate from the Midwest you knew that these people must be the most miserable fucks in the world. I was initially given the duty of being the flag man, and waved people into their spots. Almost every single person I parked gout stuck in the mud. People would lash out at the parkers saying things like "I fucking sat in 30 hours of traffic to pitch a tent in a fucking puddle of mud!!" Some people would be insubordinate and wait on the side of the road to figure things out. I held no punches for people who did this, I would basically tell them that they were fucked, and everything was too chaotic so you better appreciate your fucking pile of mud.

Everyone was getting stuck, and if you didn't have a sick SUV or some sort of car with 4 wheel drive that was high off the ground you were fucked, and you were definitely getting stuck. When the sun started to come up all of the parkers congregated together. We moved up to a different spot on higher ground in the same lot. All the parkers went crazy, everything was in shambles. We were with this crazy group of kids from Philly who had no idea who Phish were. One kid said, "I didn't know what a Phish festival was, I told my mom I was going to the Bass Masters Classic."

It was around 6:30 A.M. when things started going crazy. There was this down hill strip of land we were telling cars to go down. Eventually after telling so many cars to go through this one area of land it had gotten torn up real bad. Mike, Blatts and I were standing down the road a bit, telling people to gun it as fast as they could.

When they would reach the corner where they had to turn to go down the hill, a crazy guy from Philly who looked like a mix between sloth from Goonies and Ivan Drago from Rocky IV, would get in their faces and yell "GUN THAT SHIT!!!!, GUN THAT SHIT!!!!!! YOU BETTER FUCKING GUN THAT SHIT!!!!" as he ran along side them trying to get them through the torn up muddy shithole. This kept us entertained until our shift had ended.

When it was 7:30, the morning shift had not arrived to relieve us yet so Dave and I decided we were going to walk to where breakfast was. Mike and Blatts decided to wait around and get a ride back. Everybody we saw on the way back looked cracked out. When we finally arrived at the breakfast site Mike, and Blatts had just arrived in a van and laughed at our misfortune. We all had eggs, bacon and corned beef hash and afterwords we handed in our vests and it was finally over, we had done all of our work and the only thing left was to see Phish in about 7 hours.