THE campout of the year

Every September all of the Duke grad students have to campout for 3 straight days in order to be put in the lottery for season basketball tickets. It sounds easy to campout for 3 straight days, but here is the catch. At anytime during the 3 days they sound a siren, and you have 10 minutes to get to the sign-in tent to "check in." And the check ins are completely random and at completely inconvenient times, like all during the night. I slept for 45 minutes the first night. Add to the fact that most of the students are also fighting sobriety and lots of students don't make it through the 3 days. On one of the checks, we walked by 3 people that were so drunk, they were lying face down on a dirt hill. All the other drunk grad students were making cat calls at them or telling them to give up and the only response was a thumbs up from one of the facedown campers. Other people got drunk and held a dance party on top of a 12 foot U-haul. I really regretted not having a camera for the first day and night. I was thoroughly entertained by lots of funny stuff. About 2200 students started the competition for 700 tickets and I think about 1700 students made it through. I made it to every check in but I didn't win season tickets, but the other 5 guys from my elder's quorom that were with me did and we are splitting up the tickets. This is a picture of me and my nursing school buddies (Amy is taking the picture).

This picture doesn't describe how many people were there. There were probably 250 tents lined up and another 100 RV's and Uhauls. I "slept" in a U-haul with a tv, video games and movies set up.
Here is a lineup of some of the RVs.

Amy stopped by for a few hours on Saturday night. I had been wearing these same clothes for the last 24 hours. She is a trooper.
We had a barbecue and invited our wives and children to join us. It was pretty fun. These are some of our ward members.
This is our setup. At night we fit seven air mattresses inside. They are watching an edited copy of Shawshank Redemption. This was 5 minutes after playing MarioKart on the Wii.
This is me shredding guitar during the Guitar Hero tournament. I won this particular battle, but I lost in the 5th round and ended up in the top 20 people. I was given a Duke flash drive for my efforts. The final four was played on a 20 foot projection screen to an audience of about 400 people.
That is Coach Mike Krzyzewski, or Coach K. He is one of the most famous college coaches of all time and the US men's basketball coach. He came to give us a motivational speech the second night. Amy was with me and she became rather bored after a while. She said "if he is such a great coach, then he should be able to not just ramble." Women. But I actually agree with her. It was a long-winded speech.
There is the 20 foot projection screen I spoke of earlier. We are watching motivational clips of Duke and US men's basketball. I was personally motivated to cook another Bratwurst after this speech.