Going with me this year are Harry and Zoey Steele, friends of mine from England with whom I have corresponded via email for three years and whose wedding I crashed in May, 2001. They are due to arrive at Baltimore-Washington International airport in two days, on June 28. We'll leave the next morning, taking two days to travel out to Cornerstone. It will make the trip much more relaxing for us, which will be especially necessary since I can't quite yet imagine how we'll fit three people plus all our needed supplies into my car.
If it wasn't for the soft luggage container that I tied to the roof of my car, we never would have been able to get all our gear and all our selves out to C-stone. In fact, we delayed purchasing a couple of needed items until we arrived in Peoria, Illinois. Peoria is about an hour and a half from Bushnell but is the largest main city near the campground. Harry and Zoey had to carry a few things in their arms as they rode that last hour and a half.
Harry and Zoey were stunned by a couple of things. They had never before experienced good ol' American heat. The temperature hovered around 100 degrees during the day time (on the trip out and during each dry, dusty day at Cornerstone--see picture below.) They informed me that a rare hot day in Lincolnshire will reach 26 or 27 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Farenheit.) Add 15 to 20 degrees (F) to that and throw in plenty of humidity, and you can imagine how my dear friends were suffering.
There was something else that amazed them, their reactions to which tickled me to no end. When we stopped at Taco Bell (they had been unfamiliar with TB prior to that lunching moment), they could not believe that I would fill up my large soda cup, drink it, and refill it. They wouldn't even fill their cups half full. It was hilarious to see their great big American cups with only a few drops of Pepsi at the bottom. If we were in a proper English pub, I bet there would be a different story to report. ;-)
Harry and Zoey didn't actually arrive at BWI until Saturday (June 29, 2002) morning. Their flight from London to Newark had arrived a bit late, they were delayed in Customs, and they thus missed the only flight from Newark to Baltimore that evening. I picked them up at BWI on Saturday morning, around 8 a.m., and we repacked at my apartment and were on our way to Cornerstone before noon. We visited a friend of their parents in Ohio late that afternoon, stayed in a motel in western Indiana (off of an exit 34 miles from the IN-IL border, if my memory serves me correctly), and we arrived at Cornerstone on Sunday afternoon.
We set up two tents--one for me and one for them. The first two days, prior to any official C-stone events began, we spent basically sitting out in the heat (fortunately, we did have shade for most of the day) and swimming in the lake. We started to get know each other a little better; our only face to face contact had been 13 months earlier for a few hours at their wedding. We had been emailing each other two or three times per week over the past two years, but it's quite a different thing to be trapped in the great wide open with each other with nothing between you except hot, wet air. They were quite gracious, however, as they tolerated our daily diet of cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch (although they found the idea of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches disgusting--they wouldn't even try one), and grilled hotdogs for dinner. And water--we drank gallons of water.
I suppose there were three main highlights for me out there this summer. One was seeing Dead Artist Syndrome play (I visited them during their sound check as well as saw their main show.) I also spent an enjoyable couple of minutes chatting with Brian Healy at his booth. He's a wacky yet humble guy, and he has a lovely family.
Another highlight was being interviewed by Christianity Today magazine. Their assistant online editor had arranged this interview with me a couple of months earlier by email. John and I had an nice little chat (over the course of an hour and a half), and he took a few photos of me giving away CD's (which constitutes the third highlight.) I believe that, in all, I gave away about 500 or 600 CD's. (It's a much slower process than you might think, especially if, like me, you want to be able to take your time and talk with people.)
