The Don’t Move Firewood trip to the Newport Folk Festival can only be described by one word: Adventure.
by Natalie Garcia
The weather for the weekend called for rain. Fortunately all of day one, Poseidon was a fan of all the awesome music that was playing and decided to keep the rain away. We got the weekend started off right, and I was really excited by how many people we were able to talk to — more than 1,000 total! I was prize wheeling like it’s my job (wait, maybe that’s because it is?).
It was great to see the enthusiasm in people that knew about the firewood issue, and even more awesome to talk to new people that hadn’t heard about us, promised to let others know, and to not move their firewood anymore. One funny thing about the Newporters was that they kept telling us that handing out Frisbees was “against the rules” – who knew that all of these hipsters were such goodie two shoes?
Then of course, when it was time for us to pack up for the night, the heavens opened above Fort Adams State Park and the whole place was soaked. Great.
How were we and the 10,000 other people going to make it out of this Fort dry? The answer was, VERY SLOWLY. After the first sound of thunder, it was pretty much a mass exodus out of there, and since we were parked in the very back we were very stuck. It took us 1 hour of waiting – reading in our car – and one hour of traffic – watching a movie and getting a treat from happy festival streakers. Yup. Two gentlemen decided to let everyone stuck in traffic have a much needed giggle.
Then somehow on our return trip, Google maps decided to send us through Connecticut without me knowing. Basically I got us lost, and I had to navigate us to back to the Mass Turnpike. There was a silver lining to this detour, the Dirt Store and Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaug… two incredibly bizarre and random things we spotted on our short (de)tour of New England.