Reflections on Gauley Fest
The trip was great, don’t get me wrong. There were a few downsides and a few upsides. I’ll reflect on them as well as post a couple pictures at the end.
First off, to learn more about Gauley Fest, check out this post I wrote last week. Now that you are caught up, lets get down to business. The festival was great – everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, enjoy the river, drink lots of booze, and spend lots of money at the marketplace.
Friday
Courtney and I drove down from the Northern Virginia area and took about 5 1/2 hours to get there. We wound up taking some back roads type of way to get there but it was pretty scenic and a nice route. There was one spot in WV where we crossed by the windmills, I wish we stopped to take pictures, but it was just amazing at how big these things were. Instead of having a road that went right by them, the road literally made a giant 20 mile circle around them and you could see them from any angle. Here is a picture from Google of them.
Gas prices reached around $4.15 a gallon for unleaded as we strolled through the country side…when I had just paid $3.44 the night before outside of the BWI Airport. When we did stop to get gas, it was down to about $4.05 and stayed that price pretty much everywhere else that we saw all the way into Summersville, WV. We finally arrived in Summersville at about 6 and checked into our hotel…yes I said hotel. Rather than camp out Friday night, we stayed at the Sleep Inn because Courtney still was not feeling well and did not want to get any worse. After checking in and dropping our stuff at the hotel, we headed out to the Festival grounds to get set up for the rest of the night. We pitched our canopy, set up some tables, and the tent before the both. We wanted to save the space so no one parked right behind our area so that we could get in and out. We ran out to Wal-Mart to grab some beer and a couple other items and it was back to the festival to open up the booth and try to sell some gear! Friday night is usually just a ‘chill’ night around the campground and festival. However, this year they pushed to have the marketplace open and have the vendors set up. I was surprised by the amount of people that were actually making rounds, but it seemed as though most people were doing just that, just walking around. Not many were buying, but just looking. We had a few sales Friday night which was fine. We packed everything up around midnight and headed back to the hotel to crash.
Saturday
After sleeping in a little and getting ready, we headed back to the festival grounds to drop off a few items and make sure everything was still there! Not that I expected our canopy or anything to be missing, but I just wanted to make sure there were no issues.
During the day we headed out to Carnifex Battlefield State Park and hiked around and down to the river. We were below Pillow Rock (we have done the hike straight down to Pillow Rock before, but skipped on it this year). Around 1:30 we headed out of the park and off for some great pizza at Pies and Pints. If you are in the Fayetville area, I definitely recommend checking it out.
The Third Nail move Journey to the Center of the Earth dvdrip
We were both tired so we headed to the festival grounds to kind of just chill out and relax after making another stop back at Wal-Mart for more beer and some snacks for the evening. At the booth, Courtney laid down to take a nap and I started setting everything up for the evening marketplace. There were already a lot of people roaming around the grounds at about 5 PM so it was nice to get everything set up early. Sales throughout the evening were good but I wasn’t able to sell some of the items that I wanted to unload. I came to the festival with a truck load of gear and took a truck load home. Although it did condense down by a few boxes, so it was all good.
We were planning on camping out Saturday night right behind where our booth was, but with all the noise and drunkeness going on, we decided to pack it all up and drive home that night… we left the festival around 1:30 AM. The drive home was bad…it was late, we were tired, and it was foggy as hell! We rotated driving multiple times so the other could try to get some sleep and be refreshed for a stint at driving. We made it back into Northern Virginia around 7:30 AM. I dropped my fiance off and then headed back up to Maryland. Getting home around 8:30, I went straight to bed and crashed until around 11. Then I had to unpack everything!!!!!!
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The Secret Life of Bees dvdrip
download Absolute Zero Overall the trip was great, we met a lot of great people (shout out to the guy and gal from Merrell shoes that were next to us), and saw a lot of old friends from Radford. I took a lot of gear – Patagonia PFDs, large line of GSI Outdoors camping stuff, Light My Fire meal kits and firestarters, candle lanterns, and more. While it sold, we also got a lot of questions about Eagle Nest Outfitters hammocks, throw bags, and batteries. So maybe next year we will be able to carry some of those products and feed those requests. There was a HUGE interest in Merrell shoes too. They booth that the company had was just displaying them and doing a raffle but not actually selling. If there was a way for me to be able to carry their shoes, I would definitely take a few dozen pairs there and probably sell out of the them!
I look forward to attending next year as this was the 4th year that we have gone! Here are a couple quick pictures I grabbed. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to take any video.
Welcome back!
