ProgPower horror stories???

[TwizstedJesus]

2004

We struggled to get in to Atlanta due to the hurricane,never seeing the ground until after dark(we should have landed around 3 pm).
We had hooked up with two dudes from Hamilton Ontario,I believe they were sponsering Into Eternity (you guys out there???)
Long story short...we rode the Marta from the airport and got off one stop too soon.We get out,and I'm like...whoa,shit...this doesnt look familiar.Now mind you,my wife and I are leading these two canuckies to the hotel,us having been there before.
So we start walking,in a torrential downpour...wind gusts up to 100 MPH.My wife keeps having her suitcase ripped out of her hands.A crackhead homeless person comes out of a doorway and asks us for some money...In a fucking hurricane!!We all blow this dude off and keep walking.
A cab pulls up and asks if we need a ride and we tell him no.
Finally arrive at the Residence Inn after about 20-25 minutes of walking.
We let our fellow metalheads from the North go in first,and we stand there for a few minutes.Finally we get to the check in...the girl tells us there are no rooms left!I'm like...What the fuck! I booked this room in January!
She looks around for a few minutes and finally puts us up...In a 2 bedroom suite...full kitchen...no additional cost. We're in heaven now

End of Story...but it was one fuckered up vacation,thats for sure!

 

[Bryan316]

Herpes.


Yeah, Herpes.

Here's the short short version:

We get to our hotel last year, and they don't have any rooms available for us yet, let alone on the same floor as each other! Jeremy and I check into our room. Roger and Kevin finally get their room. We go in, and the beds are all made. But.... there's some stuff on one of the beds. I go over, it's medicine, with the pharmacy paperwork, the receipt, and bag. I look at the paper, without touching anything yet, and it's fuckin HERPES MEDICATION!!! We go downstairs and chew the desk out. They give us keycards for their new room, and we leave disgusted and appalled. We go to the preparty and have a blast. We come back, and the new room is all set. And the rest of the weekend, we're telling people about the Herpes Hotel.

We're not staying there this year.

 

[Bear]

I havent had any....

Bear

 

[Heavenly Call]

I have a recurring horror story...

I walk into the vendors room. There are dozens, no, hundreds of them. Everywhere! CD's that I desperately want/need (depending on your view). I look at my wallet...AAAAHHHHH...not enough money to buy them all!!! I must make choices!!!!!

If that's not horrifying, I don't know what it is.

 

[longshot9]

Watching Midnight get up on stage with Kamelot.

 

[caex]

I have a recurring horror story...

I walk into the vendors room. There are dozens, no, hundreds of them. Everywhere! CD's that I desperately want/need (depending on your view). I look at my wallet...AAAAHHHHH...not enough money to buy them all!!! I must make choices!!!!!

If that's not horrifying, I don't know what it is.

What is horrifying is not being able to afford a ticket when they go on sale Saturday, that is what is happening with me.

 

[Jim LotFP]

I don't know how hotel rooms work, so in trying to figure out the locks on the hotel room door last year, I chopped off my fingertip. It wasn't as bad as that makes it sound, but it is technically a correct description.

So of course Sanna's taking a dump at the time.

*knock knock* Can you open the door?

"No!"

*knock knock* Can you please let me in the bathroom?

"No!"

*knock knock* I really need to come in. Right now.

"No!"

*knock knock* Please?

"No!"

*BAM BAM BAM* OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR I'M BLEEDING TO DEATH AND THERE ARE PARTS OF MY BODY LAYING ON THE FLOOR OPEN THE FUCK UP AAAHHHHHHHHHHHH

 

[Greykiller]

2004

We struggled to get in to Atlanta due to the hurricane,never seeing the ground until after dark(we should have landed around 3 pm). So we start walking,in a torrential downpour...wind gusts up to 100 MPH......
End of Story...but it was one fuckered up vacation,thats for sure!

2004:
I drove up through Ivan, and drove back through Jean.

Had to go to three diff hotel rooms because the first two had multiple leaks through the roof. Had to pay extra $$ to the cleaning staff due to someone having such bad gaseous emissions that it smelled like roadkill in there by Sunday morning. (I won't tell you who in our group sprayed aerosol shit for three days but his name rhymes with UnkaKev uke: ).

Other than that it was ok.

2005: Spent waaaay too much $$$ and drank waaay too much and was totally trashed Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Will buy less beer and bring more $$$ this year.

 

[Jim LotFP]

No, fuck that, that's the second most horrible thing that happened to me last year.

The worst was... argghh... Sanna arrives early evening from Finland to Orlando where I was at the time, and we had the bright fucking idea to go to ProgPower after she'd booked her flight.

I also had the brilliant fucking idea to have her experience some true Americana that she has never known... so instead of just flying to Atlanta from Orlando, WE DO GREYHOUND. My idea. HAH.

It wasn't so bad. A 12 hour bus ride filled with crazy fuckers and going a half hour out of the way every 5 miles to make sure that indeed nobody is waiting for the bus in downtown Bumfucksville.

We arrive well before noon in downtown Atlanta. My bags were full of all the shit I was selling last year, and Sanna had the bags with our clothes. So we're dragging three or four HUGE goddamn bags around.

I lived in Atlanta for twelve years, seven of them downtown. I never needed a hotel there and I didn't know where the hell this Day's Inn downtown bullshit was. Neither did anybody who was around there either, as directions were awful.

So we walk all around the Peachtree Center area with these bags that would make Hercules go "What the fuck, you traveling to a brick convention and bringing along samples?". After twelve hours on a bus overnight. We're sweaty and disgusting by the time we find the hotel.

But wait, there is more!

Check-in at the hotel isn't for THREE MORE HOURS. FFUUCKKK. They do offer to hold our bags. We decide to go SHOPPING! So we take the train to Lenox and walk to the Target in the big parking garage. I smell like toxic waste filled with dead people at that point. After walking on the gravel, I also realize I have holes in the bottom of both my shoes so I'm effectively walking directly on pavement.

We get into the target, and inside a building with air conditioning, my tomb rot is even more noticeable. We're getting simple little things to kill time before we can check in to our hotel. I decide to get shoes.

I notice I have a tail. One of the employees must have thought I was one of the local urban outdoorsmen and was looking to rob the place blind because they were following me around.

I realized when I sat down in the shoe area that I really couldn't try on a lot of shoes or really take a walk in the shoes, because A- all the pairs of shoes were wired together, like somebody's going to steal ONE shoe... and B- My foot was so rancid that it was melting leather, rubber, plastic, or what the fuck ever the $15 shoes were made of, on contact. I ended up getting a pair of shoes that were too small. Serviceable for the weekend, but ate my feet alive when I got back to the warehouse a week later.

Fuck.

And then we had to make the walk back to the train station, and went back to the hotel. I think I passed a skunk and it died from the smell.

It is then that I cut the end of my finger off. Which technically, is not at all a lie or an exaggeration.

 

[Joel-RZ]

No, fuck that, that's the second most horrible thing that happened to me last year.

The worst was...

Damn dude. I don't mean to laugh at your misery, but that's funny shit, at least your description of it anyway.....the only thing I could think of to make that situation worse would have been that all that 'tomb rot' converged into your large intestine with no where to go but out...at the very same time Sanna was already occupying the shitter.....

Hopefully, this years goes better for you

 

[13ShadesofGray]

My first ProgPower was also my first cross-country flight. Flew directly into Ivan. I was fortunate to have a seat next to an ex-Air Force gentleman who kept my interest peaked with his stories about pilots cutting the engines just to scare the bejeezuz out of the rookies on board. When we started crossing into the path of the hurricane the turbulence was starting to feel like Zeus was playing ping pong with our plane. Said gentleman kept telling me it "wasn't really that bad". That was until we saw/heard/felt the wing on our side get hit by lightning. Next thing out the gentleman's mouth was, "Okay, THAT was not good.", and for the first time HE looked very scared. I'm borderline hysterical, thinking we're going to plummet out of the air when I look across the aisle and see this other guy... Bible open in his lap, praying loud enough to hear over the other borderline hysterical people on board. Seriously thought we were all going to die at that point.

About 30 minutes more of Zeus Pong and we begin our decent into Atlanta. Plane is shuddering and groaning, tipping one way then the other in this bizarre attempt to land. Lights are flickering, Flight Attendants faces are ashen, strangers holding strangers hands... We're all gearing up for a hard landing when out of nowhere the nose goes up and we end up taking off into the air again (no more than 500 feet off the ground). Pilot comes over the intercom to inform us that our landing was diverted due to a tornado touching down on the tarmac. We ended up circling over ATL for almost 90 minutes before we could land again. The cheers from passengers and crew were sooooo loud when we finally touched down and bet your ass I hugged the pilot on my way off the plane.

Second ProgPower story to come later.

 

[Tess]

Yes.

At ProgPower 5 I flew in on Wednesday so I missed all the horrible weather at the airport, BUT when I was walking to the preparty on Thursday it started pouring and I got soaking wet. To top it all off, I was wearing a WHITE shirt!!! What's a girl to do? Ugh. Talk about horrendous.

 

[Purveyor Of Evil]

IVAN...enough said.

 

[Ascension]

Yeah...l went to PP VI to see some power & prog and a pussy band like Pink Cream 69 showed up...OMG WTF!!!!

 

[Purveyor Of Evil]

You know, Ascension, I believe you one of the people who agreed with me about Barking Pumpkin's negativity. And I really appreciated it. But, now you're as bad or worse than he ever was. Why do you feel the need to tear down bands that other people enjoy?

 

[Rick Pierpont]

IVAN...enough said.

Agreed! That would be the worst. No, wait a minute, last year was the worst I don't even feel like reliving that one right now though.

As far as Ivan, our plane was touching down (on time) just as the eye was making landfall so it wasn't too bad yet. By the time we got off of the MARTA, it was raining torrents and we got more soaked than I think I've ever been in my life! It was quite the adventure as JayDub, my GF, Barb, and I went trudging through the miserable weather to get supplies to help our Texan whacko firend, Jeffro, feel better since he arrived sick as a dog! Conversely, it was hard to believe how nice it was Friday afternoon and for the rest of the event!

Next in line was the VERY first PP in Chicago. We had a fairly quiet winter in the Baltimore area that year. That is, until the day my brother and I were to take off. We ended up getting like 6 inches of snow, it took me well over 2 hours to drive what was normal 30 minutes from work to his house. Luckily he lives just 5-10 minutes from BWI, so it only took us like 20-30 minutes. Our flight was delayed, we had to go through the de-icer, etc... We finally got to our hotel jut before midnight (Thursday).

Still wired from the trip, I decided that we shoudl walk over to JJ Kelley's to see what the place was like. Wow!! I walk in and there is the nice freindly familiar face of Jax. Cool! I think. THen I realize that she's hanging with Symphony X! All the troubles of the trip went away! Damn that was one of the most amazing weekends of my life!

 

[jaimek]

Zeus pong. hahaha. You and Trace were a mess when you got in.

No horror stories for me, not even from Ivan. I got smart and went to the airport EARLY to get the earliest flight out, and I landed before the weather got ugly.

 

[Ascension]

You know, Ascension, I believe you one of the people who agreed with me about Barking Pumpkin's negativity. And I really appreciated it. But, now you're as bad or worse than he ever was. Why do you feel the need to tear down bands that other people enjoy?

Hey dude it'll be ok...I've seen other people rip Dream Theater ( my fav) to shreds and I got over it...those that like PC69 will too

 

[booB]

Yeah...l went to PP VI to see some power & prog and a pussy band like Pink Cream 69 showed up...OMG WTF!!!!

That's funny as hell!!!! (Probably because it wasn't Nevermore. LOL)

 

[trentdk]

I was taking a shower friday morning at the Residence, when Mosquito invited himself in with me. I was like, "zomg dude, what are you doing?"
"Hey man, we're all metal here, no worries".
I didn't want to be rude... /shrug