Nothing happens at Spirit West Coast before 10:30 am, with the main concerts beginning around 3 pm, so we knew we had plenty of time to relax and enjoy our morning without worrying about missing anything. Once the girls had all made their way out of the tent, I made them some sausage for breakfast. Oddly enough I almost never cook breakfast when we're at home. The girls usually just want cereal, waffles or bagels for breakfast and they make them for themselves. But when we're camping, I take advantage of the chance to cook elaborate breakfasts of all kinds. It probably seems a little backwards from the way most people do things, but it makes for a fun camping experience, I guess.
After breakfast I got ready to face my first challenge of the day - taking a shower. Even though this campground didn't have flushing toilets, they advertised that they would have showers onsite, a must for a happy camping experience for me. I wondered how many there would be and how the hundreds of campers would share them all, but I was really surprised to find that they were actually big semi-trucks that had pulled up and parked along the edge of the campground. I found out later that all the other nearby campgrounds had to walk all the way to ours to take a shower. I guess that's why they called ours a "Premium" campsite.
It was about 10:30 when I headed down to the showers and luckily for me there was hardly anyone using them at the time. The rows of chairs out front told me that there must be times where there's a line to take showers, but I just walked right in today.
The semi-truck was filled with small shower stalls that each had two curtains in them. Between the curtains was a bench where you could set your stuff. It kinda slammed down when you tried to lay it flat, and when it was folded up it attached to the wall with velcro. Ingenious, no?
I was glad for a nice, hot shower (free, too!), and I came out to find the girls playing with their new friends and reading some of the library books they'd brought. Somehow we ended up with two overstuffed bags of library books in the car, and I'm pretty sure the girls read nearly all of them by the time we packed up to go home. Something about the wind and the cold made them want to do nothing but curl up in the tent or the car and read books for hours and hours.
We eventually made it over to the concert area, after making a quick stop to buy our event wristbands at the ticket center. After many years of coming to this event, I finally got smart this year and brought chairs, snacks and blankets, towed in our new wagon, down to the concert lawn. I should also note that this is the first year ever that I didn't bring any strollers to SWC, so I'm a little nervous about the girls trekking out of there late at night. I do know that I won't miss pushing 150+ pounds of stroller up those endless hills this year - that's for sure!
The first thing the girls wanted to do (actually, the only thing they wanted to do) at SWC had nothing to do with concerts, or anything at all to do with the festival, actually. They wanted to catch crayfish. Jessey has caught crayfish at the small pond there in years past, and they got a few tips from someone who was using a trap at Fallen Leaf Lake in Lake Tahoe. He told them to use salami. They brought some sort of weird homemade contraption to the campground and I did have salami, but they forgot to bring it down to the concert site. It really is a long haul up and down that hill, so they decided to try to catch them by hand instead. (I know we're supposed to say 'crawdads' here in California, but the girls like to say the crayfish are "cray", which means crazy - see the Family Force 5 below.)
They did actually manage to catch one within a few minutes.
Then they proceeded to get covered in mud (which I'm sure is actually the rotting corpses of who-knows-what, seriously that pond is disgusting!) and were immediately banned from the lakeside after that. Unfortunately there's no running water anywhere at SWC, and the hand sanitizer would probably run away in fear at the collection of germs they now had on their hands and feet. I could just imagine myself with three kids with the stomach flu in the tent in the middle of the night. Uh, no.
Needless to say they were not happy about my declaration, but I didn't care. And as K's feet began to itch and A's hands started to smell bad, the pleadings became increasingly rare until they stopped altogether. You can't see more than a fraction of an inch into that green-tinted water, and it just sits there year-round, undisturbed.
The only point where we actually walk across the Laguna Seca Raceway is right here at the giant Cooper Tire bridge. I'm not sure how our shoes would ruin the asphalt, but we all stick to the green carpeting just to be safe.
Since we were so close to Veggieland, we thought we'd stop in and see what it was like. This was our first view at some of the cutbacks from the financial setback they suffered last year. The riding ponies were nowhere to be seen. I suddenly realized, though, that as huge as the girls are, they probably would have had to take turns riding that one giant pony they always had in the corral in case the big kids came by. They were a little sad not to be able to ride ponies, and since they all declared themselves too big to play on the bounce houses in this area, we wandered back to the art tent where the face painting had just started. After a brief wait in line, A got her turn. I noticed that only a couple of the people were actually painting kids faces. The rest of them where using some sort of sticker-stencil that they stuck to the kid's face and then painted inside of. I figured that was a good way to get volunteers for this area since they don't have to be all that artistic to pull it off. I was shocked when they actually ended up having a dragon stencil, which is what A wanted. But instead of painting in the stencil area, they rubbed glue all over the area and then stuck glitter to it. She even took the time to add some painted flames to his mouth and I was pretty impressed at how cool it looked (although the picture doesn't do it justice). I didn't know it at the time, but A told me later that the lady said it would last up to a week. I was glad to hear it, especially since I made the girls take showers just a few hours after her face was painted and it was still on there when she came out.
We walked through the vendor area to the concert lawn at the K-Love stage. It's not very crowded on this first day of the festival (which is a Thursday), so we grab a nice spot in the second grass area (the area closest to the stage gets really crowded and you have to fold your chairs up at 5 pm because it gets a little rowdy, too) and setup our chairs. The girl on stage is rapping about changing our view of stereotypes, which I suppose is an accurate thing to sing about considering she's a tiny Korean girl. Her name is HeeSun Lee, and I've never heard of her before.
the second grass area
The next band is Capital Kings, a late add to the festival that was labeled as a band for the dub-steppers in the crowd. Unfortunately my crunk-rockin' dub-step lovin' child is not impressed. She wants to hear songs like Family Force 5's Cray Button, one of her favorites.
There was a little break before The City Harmonic came on and K entertained herself by playing with Grace and Gabriel, whom she'd found nearby on the lawn. They play catch for a long time in the open area on the lawn where no one wants to sit because it's right behind the light towers and you can't see the stage.
When the City Harmonic comes on, I remember why I love this festival so much. It was quite an experience to listen to them sing Manifesto with the bass beats pounding in my heart - truly one of my all-time favorite sensations.
The next band up is Matthew West. I remember seeing him here at SWC before and he is hilarious. C instantly falls in love with him when he goes all 'Adam Sandler' and sings a song he made up while he was waiting for his turn to come on stage. It involves talking about the Port-a-Pottys and is an instant hit with the kids. And thanks to the miracle that is the internet and Youtube, you can all enjoy it, too!
Matthew West really is a funny guy, and he's an amazing songwriter, too. I love seeing him in concert because he can't help but tell the stories behind all the songs he writes. A few years ago, while looking for inspiration for a new song, Matthew initiated a contest. He wanted people to send in their stories and he was going to choose one winner and write a song about their life story. Well, as it turns out, he was so moved by every single one of the thousands of stories he received that he's been writing songs about them ever since. Two full albums have now been released with songs like "Strong Enough", "My Own Little World", "Forgiveness", and the song "Hello, My Name Is", which is currently one of my kids' favorites. The K-Love booth was handing out giant, red and white name-tags that said "Hello, My Name Is" and invited the festival attendees to take them and fill them out with descriptions of their new identities in Christ. It was pretty cool to look around and see the things people had written on their cards as they held them up during the song. Matthew was moved as well by the sheer number of name-tags in the audience.
The last concert of the night was Tenth Avenue North, but by this time the girls were exhausted and hungry and we decided to call it a night. I've seen these guys many times, and I was ok with saving our energy for the bands that were still coming in the next two days, so we packed up our wagon and headed up the hills to the campground. After a quick dinner, the girls crawled in the tent for bed around 9:30 and I headed to the car to watch a movie. I'd brought a little portable DVD player with me since I've been enjoying watching movies on my laptop in bed lately and cozied up with a Netflix rental of Fred Claus.
I also had decided earlier in the day that I'd like to make some hats for the girls since it's considerably colder here than I was expecting. I'd brought a ton of yarn with me thinking I'd play around with it a bit, but I didn't really have any other inspiration. So, while I watched my movie I made A an orange hat with ear flaps and tassels. It was pretty cute!
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