Phish, 8/14-15/04, Coventry Festival, Coventry, VT

This wasn't just the last time Phish would ever play together. This was an adventure. Or, more accurately, an ordeal. After enduring numerous disasters, collisions, inconveniences, and 21 hours of standstill traffic, the crew of the recreational vehicle known as the Steel Burrito™ remained determined to enter the fabled land known as Coventry. Although we were among the 40,000 who were turned away from the gate and missed the entire first day (a muddy mess that I'm not very sorry about avoiding), on Sunday we set our sights north yet again, and - with karma very much on our side - eventually made it in. The show I witnessed on August 15, 2004 was the most emotional musical event of my life, and something which I will never forget. I will be forever grateful that I was priveledged to share it with such a wonderful group of people.

Here's a brief pictorial of how it went down...


Our last fuel stop before hitting traffic. As you can see, the Steel Burrito™ was a 34-foot monster. From left to right: iamhdm (Heather), nubjamin (me), A.Z. (Alex), FredWesleyFanclub (Mike), KyndKyd (Jed), Navin R. Johnson (Bryan), and Justin (Justin).


Heather and Alex play a few hands while sitting in traffic.


Here's what traffic looked like from the viewpoint of our dashboard fish pinata. At this point we still thought we were getting somewhere. How very naive we were...


This was taken approximately 24 hours after the previous picture, after sitting in traffic all night and eventually getting turned away due to the mud situation. We were lucky enough to find a very cool RV campground where we could relax, drink beer, listen to the show with a bunch of other hippies who got turned away, and use flush toilets with wild abandon. Here you can see Mike directing his mojo towards me. Justin and Bryan are cooking burgers, and Jed is eating dirt or something.


Alex tosses around the frisbee at sunset while the pinata keeps watch. It's possible that he was playing frisbee with Carini, a fellow senator, who happened to be camped two spots away from us.


By this point, things were looking up. We managed to work our way into a caravan of cars which was driving up to a farm within 5 miles of the festival. Here we see Alex getting geared up, with Heather in the background. It took a day longer than expected, but we had finally made it "FARTHAR."


Jed straps in for the ground assault. Vermont is beautiful, by the way.


And we're in! I can't tell you how good that felt. Shakedown was total madness, as you might expect.


The concert ground was total mud-caked carnage. Luckily it had dried out a lot by this point and was fairly manageable.


Mike and Alex survey the scene.


It wasn't hard to spot Phrodo41 (Nathan) in his Rhombus fatigues.


70,000 people is a lot.