Car-free Day drives home its message
Imagine a city less dependent on cars while enjoying music and more at trio of festivals
contemporary, community.
MAIN STREET FESTIVAL (Main Street from Broadway to East 30th Avenue, June 17) On Main Street, be on the lookout for 10 stages, organized by local groups and businesses like Accordion Noir, Neptoon Records, and Red Cat Records. Along with children’s activities and interactive arts installations, new partnerships with the Mount Pleasant BIA and the Fox and the Wild Salmon Creative Café will all add to the excitement.
> BY MIKE USINGER
You’ve got the basics for camping covered—the 16foot Lotus Belle Outback Deluxe tent, Exped Megamat Duo 10 sleeping pad, and YETI Tundra 50 cooler. But whether you’re car camping in Squamish or trundling off the grid to the middle of nowhere 200 miles north of Williams Lake, it’s the little hacks that make getting away from it all truly wonderful.
Here are five must-haves designed to make your camping experience considerably more enjoyable than that time your parents took you to an overrun Cultus Lake with a piece of stained green foam for a mattress, a Donald’s plastic shopping bag/polar Bear Ice block “cooler”, and a DIY tent fashioned out of a trashed blue tarp and four semibroken sticks.
COGHLAN’S EGG HOLDER As Iron Chef Bobby Flay has noted, everything tastes better with an egg on it. The problem with eggs is that they have to be in a cooler. And because they tend to come in either Styrofoam or cardboard packaging, they inevitably end up smashed when you’re rooting around the YETI Tundra 35, three sheets to the wind, for that ninth bottle of 33 Acres of Sunshine French Blanchè at 2 in the morning. Problem solved with Coghlan’s Egg Holder. Made out of hard yellow plastic with a flip-up lid that claps shut, it provides a more or less indestructible case for your cackleberries, guaranteeing that when you need something to top off your Spiced Mustard Hash Browns (recipe courtesy of Bobby Flay), you won’t be standing there thinking “I wish I hadn’t broken all the eggs after drunkenly rooting around for that bottle of Michter’s Celebration Sour Mash Whiskey at 4 a.m.” ($2.70 at www.mec.ca/)
SOUNDFREAQ SOUND SPOT Here’s something to keep in mind when out in nature: as much as you love, in no particular order, Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff”, Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba”, and everything by that subhuman Hank Williams Jr., odds are good no one on the next site over wants to hear that shit. So if you’ve gotta show up with an ipod playlist titled Ruining It for Everyone Else Redneck-style, bring some headphones. That important fact out of the way, music makes every camping experience more memorable, whether you’re sitting by a lazy river to the Meat Puppets’ “Swimming Ground” or shotgunning Miller High Life tallboys to Hank III’S “Not Everybody Likes Us”. What sets Soundfreaq’s