My gf and I lived about 5 hours north in FL. Both young veterinarians in our 2nd year out of school. While I had been heavily into the Dead for many years and had a friend who kept urging me to turn on to Phish, it never happened. Then the Y2K NYE happened and we couldn’t decide what to do, especially when the world was thinking all tech on the planet might crash. Literally about 5 days beforehand I caught an ad for the Cypress shows and as we liked camping anyway, we decided what better way to spend the night and weekend than in a rural spot, in case of TEOTWAWKI. We both had to work late and this is our first Phish show ever, so what did we know about traffic jams? As it turned out we didn’t arrive that night until about 1 AM and it was perfect. We were literally the only car on the road coming in. We had to honk a bit to even find security to ask where to park, the signs were useless. They just kept gesturing “further that way”. We drove through many lanes of completely full lots and then eventually I found a HUGE field well south of the stage that literally had not a car on it. We shrugged, pulled up as close towards the stage as we could, unloaded and set up. Wandered around for a bit and by the time we got back there were about a dozen other cars that also were in the field, all scattered around with hundreds of yards in between us. So we missed the soundcheck (didn’t know there would be one), missed all the traffic, were in a super-quiet mellow area which was fine with us (but about a mile walk to the stage), and it began what is still an obsession today that never gets old. Thank you everyone for making that weekend what it was!!!

P.S.—my very strict and Christian boss sat me down the next week at work and asked me suspiciously, “The newspaper review said there was an enormous cloud of marijuana smoke over the crowd the entire time,” as he eyed me suspiciously. I shrugged and said that was just the media being the media, sure I saw a few people here and there who maybe were sharing something but “clouds of smoke?” Pah!!! Of course in the back of my head I’m remembering the time where we moved our listening spot because we could hardly see the stage from all the herb lighting off around us. ;-)