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Roadtrip To Hartford, Connecticut
(Friday, July 10th - Sunday, July 13th, 2004)
"Wheels of fire burn the night.
Ride across the sky.
Wheels of fire burning bright.
We live to ride."
(from "Return Of The Warlord" by Manowar)
Now, anyone who even half knows what I'm like would know that I'm kind of stuck in the 70's and 80's. So when I heard that this (2004) year's Ozzfest was featuring the original line-up of Black Sabbath, the 1990 line-up of Judas Priest, and the original line-up of Slayer, I was prepared to go to some serious lengths to attend. Three of my friends (Evening Tsar, Strannik, and Reichkrusher) and I rented a minivan and booked to stay at the Mark Twain Hostel in Hartford, Connecticut. Tickets were bought and mailed to us, in advance. Actually, we left all the organizing to Strannik (an excellent job done, too!).
(pic: [from left to right] Myself, Reichkrusher, and Strannik in front of the diner, the name of which I don't remember)
Before checking in, we decided to take in some breakfast. We decided on this cool, 50's-looking diner. It served up typical diner fare. Just what we needed after the long trip getting there, something reliable with no surprises. I had the French toast and two (or was it three?) cups of the black-juice-from-hell, cööööffeeeee! After driving around exploring, we checked into the hostel and slept for a few hours.
(pic: [from left to right] Reichkrusher, myself, and Strannik in the "heavy metal parking lot")
Refreshed after the much needed nap, we headed off towards the concert grounds. There was free parking for concert goers but we had to walk like 10 minutes or so to get to and from the venue. Somewhere halfway there, Evening Tsar realized that he had forgotten his ticket in the minivan so he and I went back while Strannik and Reichkrusher kept on going. It wasn't the distance that made the walk unenjoyable. It was the sun and the heat. If it wasn't for my hat I would have had a tanned scalp. By the end of the day even Reichkrusher, who's got long hair, got his scalp sun-burned along the part in his hair!
The concert grounds was one of those ones owned by a huge corporation; in this case, the Dodge automobile people. (A Dodge dealership was on the property). It was bad enough that we were too far from the stage. While bands played on, advertising for Dodge cars and trucks were played on their "jumbo-trons", a few stories above the stage. How fukkin annoying it that? If you were lucky enough to have a ticket for seats in the stadium, you were spared this intrusion.
The crowd, not surprisingly, was a mixed one. We spotted a few neo-nazis, outlaw bikers, and those other individuals we don't mind hearing about getting themselves smeared along the 401.
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