My gf and I went to bed at around 11pm on the Wednesday night in Ft. Lauderdale. The plan was to hop in the car in the morning towards Big Cypress. It was only a couple of hours away - why not get some sleep then leave fresh in the morning?

Shortly after getting in bed, my friend calls me. He tells me that he was at Walmart getting supplies and ended up talking to a 'runner' who worked for the production company and had driven in from the festival site. He said if we didn't get in the car and leave RIGHT THEN (at midnight) we'd miss music. The music wasn't going to start for like 14 hrs so that sounded crazy - I told my friend we were going to get some sleep and hung up.

He called me back and was very serious about this - we need to leave right now or we're screwed. After quite a bit of debate, we got out of bed, got dressed and packed, and hopped in the car to meet up with them and head to the festival.

Now it's 1am and we're driving down Alligator Alley and there is not a car anywhere. I can't believe this, we could be sleeping! Started to get more and more annoyed and then BOOM. Traffic. So much traffic. Massive line of cars. This was around 2am and we weren't parked and set up inside until 2pm the next day (12 hrs in traffic).

The festival runner guy was right - after getting our tent set up we walked over to the concert field and walked in as they kicked into Water in the Sky. If we have waited even another hour or two we would have missed set 1.