Jemfest X 2010 Adventures (Part 1)
Lo and behold I wake up once again in the wrath of Florida. I don’t really understand this place. So many people look to Florida as being like a paradise on Earth, and I just do not understand it. I may be slightly tainted by my recent string of unfortunate events, but even before, I still couldn’t comprehend. This is a rant for another time, as I can probably write a whole blog about that. But I have so much more to get to first.
First, let’s talk about the string of events that lead to FL night #2. Jemfest. That’s how it ALL started. We were invited to play it a few months back, and initially had reservations about it. It’s a very cool event in theory, but just never really has the turnout to make it worth what it takes to participate. It’s usually in FL, and just the transportation makes it rough. Unfortunately, there’s often not much turnout, and it’s not a paying gig, so it makes it a hard thing to justify. It’s cool and fun, it just ultimately doesn’t outweigh the effort and expense.
However, we were informed that Steve Vai would be in attendance this year, and that ultimately we may have a chance of him witnessing our performance. It was decided that THIS was something that we really shouldn’t pass up. So, we all pulled our crap together to make it happen. We did a lot extra rehearsals, scrimped up our cash and set off.
We set off in 2 vehicles, Jay’s truck, and my Subaru. James rode with me, Angel with Jay. We left about 8:30 on Thursday night. Things started off well.
Obstacle #1: Absolutely ridiculous traffic backup in Virginia. They apparently knocked a section of highway down to one lane to repaint lines. I personally think that on a major stretch of highway such as I-95 where there is a steady flow of traffic, they should NEVER knock it down to one lane. So THAT took us over an hour to conquer just a few miles. After that though, things were pretty smooth sailing. That is, until daylight.
We were in GA, just north of Savannah, and my A/C stopped working. Of course, in all the things I threw in my “just in case” tote, my A/C pressure gauge wasn’t one of them. So we proceeded to Wal-mart where I bough some Freon/Gauge. The A/C compressor was obviously overheating, because it was jacking the pressure way up with hot air. No go on the quick fix, and off we were with windows down.
Even before we left, I had a gut feeling that I wasn’t really going to be able to get any decent sleep before the show, namely because I don’t do well at all trying to sleep in moving vehicles. If I try, I usually end up waking up like every 5-10min, and never can fully rest. Plus, we were to be arriving not all THAT long before the show, so yeah, I kinda foresaw little rest. Now, tack on no A/C, and there was basically no shot of rest. I can barely function if it’s over room temperature, and I’m extremely cranky whenever it’s resembling “hot.” Driving in Florida summer heat, I was barely surviving. I got maybe 10-20 minutes worth of broken sleep over 2-3 hours and was just miserable despite the airflow in the car.
Shortly into Florida, in my effort to sleep, James nudges me to tell me “There’s something wrong with the car, as he’s pulling toward the shoulder. Basically, it was acting as if we had run out of gas, but it didn’t. I inspected what was going on under the hood, and it seemed that part of the throttle that turned with the cable wasn’t turning right. So I sprayed a little WD40 on it, and it did turn, and when it did, the car started back up. Everything seemed to be ok.
A few miles further down the road, it died out again, same way. I inspected some other things, and everything seemed fine. I can’t recall how many times we stopped, but it happened every few miles, the car was off for a few minutes each time, and each time I had tried a few different things. I had eventually on one of these stops came to the conclusion that it could be a clogged fuel filter, so as such, I was going to bypass it. I had made a coupler out of a pen that I was going to use to join the hoses together. Since I couldn’t get one of the hoses off the filter, I had to cut it. Now, my coupler was too short, so I had to make another one. I used an tire pressure gauge, gutted it, and used the tube to connect between the hoses. This worked, but I had a super hard time getting the hose on one side around the tube. Finally after some good time beating it up, I got it assembled, and it worked.
We headed off again, and this time, it stayed running strong. From where I had completed the fix, we drove about 40 miles to meet back up with Angel and Jay, and refuel. I re-inspected the patch job, and all seemed to be holding up. So we headed the last 40 miles or so to Orlando. Of course during this time it would start to rain on us, since it was too hot to roll up windows. Also, we hit all of the Walt Disney World tourist/vacationer traffic. James was driving, and I shared his frustration with the absurdly horrific Florida driving experience. The essence of trying to to drive in Florida is probably most accurately compared to taking cactus needles and sticking them into your eyeball one at a time. Except, maybe a little more frustrating. And time consuming.
But we made it to the hotel by like 4:15, and check in was at 4:00. So despite all of the detractions, we really didn’t lose much time in way of what we were sorta scheduled for. It’s always good to have a buffer like that just in case. We made it alive, and I was functioning, but cranky, sweaty, and tired. Time to get to that hotel room….
First, let’s talk about the string of events that lead to FL night #2. Jemfest. That’s how it ALL started. We were invited to play it a few months back, and initially had reservations about it. It’s a very cool event in theory, but just never really has the turnout to make it worth what it takes to participate. It’s usually in FL, and just the transportation makes it rough. Unfortunately, there’s often not much turnout, and it’s not a paying gig, so it makes it a hard thing to justify. It’s cool and fun, it just ultimately doesn’t outweigh the effort and expense.
However, we were informed that Steve Vai would be in attendance this year, and that ultimately we may have a chance of him witnessing our performance. It was decided that THIS was something that we really shouldn’t pass up. So, we all pulled our crap together to make it happen. We did a lot extra rehearsals, scrimped up our cash and set off.
We set off in 2 vehicles, Jay’s truck, and my Subaru. James rode with me, Angel with Jay. We left about 8:30 on Thursday night. Things started off well.
Obstacle #1: Absolutely ridiculous traffic backup in Virginia. They apparently knocked a section of highway down to one lane to repaint lines. I personally think that on a major stretch of highway such as I-95 where there is a steady flow of traffic, they should NEVER knock it down to one lane. So THAT took us over an hour to conquer just a few miles. After that though, things were pretty smooth sailing. That is, until daylight.
We were in GA, just north of Savannah, and my A/C stopped working. Of course, in all the things I threw in my “just in case” tote, my A/C pressure gauge wasn’t one of them. So we proceeded to Wal-mart where I bough some Freon/Gauge. The A/C compressor was obviously overheating, because it was jacking the pressure way up with hot air. No go on the quick fix, and off we were with windows down.
Even before we left, I had a gut feeling that I wasn’t really going to be able to get any decent sleep before the show, namely because I don’t do well at all trying to sleep in moving vehicles. If I try, I usually end up waking up like every 5-10min, and never can fully rest. Plus, we were to be arriving not all THAT long before the show, so yeah, I kinda foresaw little rest. Now, tack on no A/C, and there was basically no shot of rest. I can barely function if it’s over room temperature, and I’m extremely cranky whenever it’s resembling “hot.” Driving in Florida summer heat, I was barely surviving. I got maybe 10-20 minutes worth of broken sleep over 2-3 hours and was just miserable despite the airflow in the car.
Shortly into Florida, in my effort to sleep, James nudges me to tell me “There’s something wrong with the car, as he’s pulling toward the shoulder. Basically, it was acting as if we had run out of gas, but it didn’t. I inspected what was going on under the hood, and it seemed that part of the throttle that turned with the cable wasn’t turning right. So I sprayed a little WD40 on it, and it did turn, and when it did, the car started back up. Everything seemed to be ok.
A few miles further down the road, it died out again, same way. I inspected some other things, and everything seemed fine. I can’t recall how many times we stopped, but it happened every few miles, the car was off for a few minutes each time, and each time I had tried a few different things. I had eventually on one of these stops came to the conclusion that it could be a clogged fuel filter, so as such, I was going to bypass it. I had made a coupler out of a pen that I was going to use to join the hoses together. Since I couldn’t get one of the hoses off the filter, I had to cut it. Now, my coupler was too short, so I had to make another one. I used an tire pressure gauge, gutted it, and used the tube to connect between the hoses. This worked, but I had a super hard time getting the hose on one side around the tube. Finally after some good time beating it up, I got it assembled, and it worked.
We headed off again, and this time, it stayed running strong. From where I had completed the fix, we drove about 40 miles to meet back up with Angel and Jay, and refuel. I re-inspected the patch job, and all seemed to be holding up. So we headed the last 40 miles or so to Orlando. Of course during this time it would start to rain on us, since it was too hot to roll up windows. Also, we hit all of the Walt Disney World tourist/vacationer traffic. James was driving, and I shared his frustration with the absurdly horrific Florida driving experience. The essence of trying to to drive in Florida is probably most accurately compared to taking cactus needles and sticking them into your eyeball one at a time. Except, maybe a little more frustrating. And time consuming.
But we made it to the hotel by like 4:15, and check in was at 4:00. So despite all of the detractions, we really didn’t lose much time in way of what we were sorta scheduled for. It’s always good to have a buffer like that just in case. We made it alive, and I was functioning, but cranky, sweaty, and tired. Time to get to that hotel room….