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.
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One of the largest whitewater focused outdoor events, 
