Photo Gallery - Skamania Folk Festival - Mt. St. Helens

Dan and I camped out for two REALLY hot (~105F) days and nights at the Skamania County Fairgrounds, Stevenson, Washington. What's in it? The Skamania Folk Festival! Two days and two nights of solid folk, country, celtic, bluegrass, jazz, string band, banjo, irish dancers clicking heels, Irish flute, fiddle, uillean pipes, ceili barn dance, and all that! The days were too hot and there were around 50 to 100 people at most. But we made the best out of it. Specially when I like Celtic music so much, and Dan too! And Dan and me had all different kinds of chats -- starting from philosophy to history, American culture versus other cultures, religious traditions and science, lots of music, lots of movies, blah blah blah... You know the routine if you know me (or Dan, for that matter, hehehe)...

The second day of the festival, we took the road to Mt. St. Helens -- the famous live volcano that had a catastrophic eruption on May 18, 1980. It's still going through a phase of moderate eruption since 2004. Dan's pretty old car (which he drove all the way from Minnesota to Oregon!) was our transport. As we went up, Dan's car got heated up, and we had to stop to let the radiator cool down. We got hell scared. We rarely had any other cars on the road, and didn't know how to go back if our car broke down totally! However, we took the risk and drove up to the first viewpoint, and decided to go back. On our way back, Dan was riding the brakes all the way through, and he was on D gear! Soon afterwards, we smelled something burning and smoke started coming out of the wheels! "God, we're gonna be stranded here!" I thought. We stopped, a friendly couple on a huge motorbike came over to help us. They told us not to ride the brakes and stay on D2 gear. They almost escorted us to the nearest town. And we were relieved to get back to Stevenson.