Back In The Saddle Again!

I made it back off the island safe and sound! What a weekend! This will definately be a long entry today, so settle yourself in, lol!

Thursday night I talked to Carrie on the phone for a bit and then talked to Ryan afterwards. He had to go into work on Friday as he was working a good lead. He was talking to Matt early that evening and Matt also had to go into work (he's also a car salesman, in Saint John), so they decided that we would still leave on Friday, but just later in the day. Ryan was hoping to get out of work by 1 p.m.

Ryan called me at around 2 p.m. and was held up at work. He had a good morning at work and had to deliver 2 vehicles he sold, so he was hoping he'd be able to get out of work by 4 now. Long story short, he worked the whole day. I had to be "sick" on Friday, but had I known how delayed we would have been, I would have worked 1/2 my shift. Oh well. So by the time we actually got on the road and did the drive-thru thing for supper, it was 6:30 p.m. Matt and Melissa were in Moncton already waiting for us, killing time at the mall. We called them when we were first getting to Moncton, met them at the Burger King, went to the Liquor Store, dropped Matt's car off at a friend of my mom's house and were finally on our way to P.E.I - at close to 10 p.m.

We made it to the island and went to eat at the Boston Pizza in Charlottetown. We had arrangements to camp in Matt's uncle's backyard, who lived outside of Charlottetown in Cornwall. It was so late that we drove around just looking for some woods to pitch the tent for the night and then go to the uncle's place in the morning. Fact of the day - P.E.I. has no woods - every inch of that place is occupied! So we ventured to Cornwall and find the uncle's house. This was like 1:30 a.m. by now. Just so you know, setting up a tent in the dark isn't much fun. Uncle also wasn't home this weekend, he was vacationing in N.B. There go my ideas of a flush toilet and a shower. Oh well, there will be bushes in the backyard to hide in to pee. Wrong. There were a couple trees, but no bushes to conceal yourself in. Night time was fine, no one would see you. Daytime not so much. Put it this way, I mastered the art of peeing in a tent into a cup.

Saturday we went into town and had breakfast at a Chinese/Canadian restaurant. I ordered scrambled eggs and sausages. It looked somewhat like what I'd ordered, but it surprisingly tasted a lot like rice, egg rolls, chicken balls, lol. We then started making our way out of the downtown area and found a much better way to the concert site and a wicked parking place, so we were all set for when we decided to head back. This was about noon at this point, of which we could enter the concert grounds if we wanted to, but we chose to wait as the opening acts were sh*t.

We stopped at a Go Kart track on the way back to Cornwall and met up with Melissa's friend Scott who came over to the island for the concert by himself. We went back to the "campsite" and it started pouring rain. Luckily I had brought a tarp so we strung that up and sat under the tent and had a couple of beers waiting out the rain.

At around 4 p.m. we made our way to the concert. I agreed to be the D.D. (designated driver) for the event (I had only had 1 beer at the "campsite") so that the others could drink. I'm not a big drinker myself, so this didn't bother me in the least. We park in our spot we picked out earlier and started walking towards the concert. We're approaching the raceway where the concert was being held and Scott tells us that he forgot his ticket in the car. He runs back and we wait for him to come back. He returns after about 15 minutes and then we're in.

The first place we hit was the beer garden and we stayed in there for a good few hours. This was Melissa's first outdoor concert and she decided she'd go all out and decided to participate in the mud wrestling that was going on. She was mess to say the least. I saw a few familiar faces while we were in the beer garden - Joel who works with Ryan and who was over to the house last week and Jamie, my friend Sherri's husband - Sherri I got a picture of Jamie, it's on my Facebook page, lol.

After Cheap Trick finished playing and everyone had finished with their beer tickets and $5 hotdogs, popcorn or hamburgers, we headed out to the main area in preparation for Aerosmith. We managed to worm our way up pretty close, but not without separating. We knew this would eventually happen. The plan was to all meet at the car if we got separated. It was all good, Ryan and I were together and I had the keys to Scott's car (we took his and not mine...thank God cause Melissa was covered in mud) so it was all good.

We were waiting for Aerosmith to come on and I recognized a guy who was standing in front of me. I then realized where I recognized him from - he currently works at the Petro where Carrie, Ryan and I used to work. I said to him "Hey, you're from Fredericton, you work at the Petro don't you" and he looked at me shocked, thinking "How the hell does this girl know me", so I told him I go there regularly and that I used to work there. We talked for a while about Neil (the boss there) and he was surprised that Neil came to Carrie's wedding when I told him, lol. So Carrie, once again we can say "It all goes back to the Petro"...even travelling to P.E.I.!

Aerosmith came on stage and rocked, although I was a little dispointed that they played a good 1/2 hour worth of sh*t when they could have been playing some better songs. There were a good dozen that they didn't play that I did want to hear. For example they didn't do Janey's got a gun, Come together, Crazy, Amazing, Dues Wild, Back in the saddle, to name a few. They opened with Love in an elevator - which was fackin' awesome and did play some great tunes like What it takes, Crying, Eat the rich, Living on the edge, Sweet emotion and encored with Walk this way. I was disappointed that they only did 1 song for an encore, but nothing can ruin how I felt being there holding the man I love and watching Steven Tyler sing "I don't wanna miss a thing". It was incredible!

So they played for almost 2 hours in total. I got some pretty good pictures (check em out of my Facebook page) and also got some video with my digital camera (sound and all!) which once I figure out how to post, I will. Getting out of the concert wasn't too bad surprisingly, though if Ryan had have let go of my hand I would have gotten sucked into the crowd for sure. We all met back at the car as planned and maybe only had to wait about 10 minutes tops to get out and be able to drive home at a good pace. I was shocked really, because every outdoor concert I've ever gone to, I've had to wait like an hour to get out of there.

We drove back to Cornwall and stopped at the only place open in this little village to get something to eat - Pizza Delight. We luckily managed to get our order in before they shut things down for the night - this place was swamped with orders. Bear in mind this is a little small village with a population of a couple thousand and they totally didn't expect to be this busy. Anyway, after 45 minutes of waiting, we got our pizza and headed back to the "campsite". We had some more beverages and then crashed, knowing we had to get up early. Matt had to be back home in Saint John by 3 p.m.

We got up in the morning, had the rest of our pizza for breakfast, tore down camp, packed the car and were outta there in no time. We surprisingly didn't have to wait long at the bridge at all - good thing we left early. I'd heard that in the afternoon the line up to cross the bridge was all the way back to the village of Crapaud.

We made our way to Moncton and picked up Matt's car and said farewell to he and Melissa. Ryan and I stayed in Moncton for a bit and had lunch at East Side Marios and then went shopping at the Old Navy store there. We took our time the rest of the afternoon, stopping at Grand Lake to dip our feet in (I wanted to swim but we had no place to change into our bathing suits) and then we stopped on the old highway somewhere for an ice cream.

All in all it was a great weekend, mind you I did have a streak in there where I was bitchy to Ryan - a.k.a. driving around at 1:30 a.m. looking for a place to tent while Matt, Melissa and I are all voting to go back and find the uncle's house, which is what we eventually did. I have apologized to him for my cranky-ness, but can ya blame me. It was 1:30 a.m. and we had just driven to P.E.I. - I was tired and wanted to settle in for the night, lol.