The adjective of the weekend was "backwoods"

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Homeward, These Shoes. How much do I love Iron & Wine? So much!

This weekend, James & some friends & I decided it would be a great idea to go to Pickin' in the Panhandle, the annual West Virginia bluegrass and barbecue* festival.

It was, indeed, a great idea. (Honestly, how could any event involving a barbecue competition not be a great idea?) But like all great ideas, it could only be fulfilled through strife.

Backwoods strife.

Back Creek Valley is, as the festival website promises, quite beautiful. It is also accessible solely by way of winding, country-mountain roads, the kind that don't have stripes, or enough room for two cars to pass each other comfortably, or guard rails between your car and a deadly tumble down the mountainside. Basically, they are backwoods roller coasters.

So when the sun's shining, and you're in the passenger seat with your right foot mashing the Invisible Brake Pedal, and you're cradling your gas station coffee in one hand and gripping the door handle in the other, and the car's coasting down the mountain at fifty miles an hour in neutral, those roads are a lot of fun. They also kind of negate the need for that coffee.

They're a little less fun when you're tired out from some less-than-satisfactory camping sleep, in the driver's seat of a car that isn't yours. It might be better in a more familiar car, but as it stands, those roads become less roller coaster, more steely-eyed test of driving Zen. (Absolute regard for safety might dictate that you drive at the same snail's-pace of all those other out-of-state cars, but pride compels you to at least drive at the speed limit, or what you presume would be the speed limit if the road were well-trafficked enough to actually warrant posting one.) Still, it's kind of fun. There's a sense of triumph when you reach your destination, like your cushy suburban upbringing hasn't left you entirely soft.

Those roads are not at all fun at midnight, when you're alone in the car, trying to navigate an area pock-marked with abandoned barns, rusting mobile homes, the occasional possum, and God knows how many lurking deer, the kind you know are just waiting to leap into your path and help you file your first auto insurance claim. Sure, you could be around a campfire, roasting hot dogs and listening to bluegrass, but you're not, because the campsite turned you away at 11:00 pm, for reasons known only to them, and now you're one wrong turn away from a starring role in a backwoods horror movie. It goes without saying that your cell phone doesn't get any reception.

Eventually everything worked out all right: Although the original plan of me meeting everyone else at the campsite didn't work out, James and I were finally able to get in touch, and his parents kindly let me crash at their place at midnight. We tried the campsite again the next day, and they let us in without blinking, despite telling James last night that the only way they could let me in would be if he threw me in the backseat with a blanket over me.**

Then we ate some barbecue, drank some beer, listened to some bluegrass (including a wholly unexpected cover of Death Cab For Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark"), and ate some delicious campfire cooking.

It was good times.

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*Barbecue: on the list of words I can never remember how to spell. The "q" in BBQ always makes me think there should be a "q" in the actual word. Turns out there's not.

**Did we have a camping pass? Yes. Yes, we did. We even had valid festival tickets! What we didn't have were the special glasses so we could read the invisible text on the website about no admission after x o'clock.