I’m lying on a blue sleeping bag with my backpack propping my
head up while the sides of my drab, olive-green pup tent are whipping back and
forth in the howling wind, and water
seeps into the corners, rudely ignoring my polite reminders that this tent is
in fact waterproof and would you kindly respect that. On either side of me are other people in
other tents, and we’re all in the middle of the Layton Hills Mall parking lot. And
we’re all here while our tents try to blow away with us inside because in two
days, on Labor Day morning, the new Buffalo Wild Wings franchise in Layton
opens for business, and the first one hundred people there get free wings for
an entire year. Let me repeat that for
emphasis. One hundred people will be
eating the best wings ever to not actually be grown on buffalo totally FREE for an entire year. We’re talking
the Kobe beef of buffalo wings here; among the
most incredible foodstuffs known to man.
Klondike bars are awesome, but if you asked me what I’d do for a
Klondike bar, I’d tell you that I’d perhaps exchange one US dollar for it, and
no more. But for a year of BWW, I would
give a sponge bath to a transient, I would spend a day with Justin Bieber, I
would delouse Bigfoot and braid all his body hair (or, lacking a Bigfoot, I
would provide the same service to Robin Williams.). Because it’s just that good.
And so here I am, number 40 in line, with about 40 hours to go before the gates of Shan Gra La are laid open before me and I enter the land of blazing sauce and honey-mustard. And with all that time to kill, I thought I might as well document my experience on my blog.
My original plan was to get here early tomorrow afternoon
(Sunday), since I figured most people would plan on arriving sometime Sunday
evening, but since I wanted to be sure, I passed by the BWW while doing some
other shopping this morning and to my surprise there were already three tents
set up in front of the restaurant. That
made me realize that I wasn’t the only one who appreciated the phenomenal
powers of these wings, and I knew I couldn’t afford to wait until Sunday if I
really wanted this.
So I went home and packed as quickly and lightly as I could,
and I arrived here around 3 PM, equipped only with a tent, sleeping bag,
pillow, guitar, laptop, scriptures, and my iron will.
In the few hours in between me checking and coming back, the
line had grown to about 38 people, putting me right around number forty. I took my place on the eastern corner of the
building and went about setting up camp.
This proved to be harder than I’d envisioned.
In my haste to pack I’d done a pretty slapdash job, and I’d
grabbed the first tent I saw, which happened to be a large 8 man deal and
proved to be impossible to set up in a parking lot. The tent was constructed unconventionally,
and the only possible way for the tent to stay up was for it to be staked
down. Since I didn’t have any concrete
nails with me and the mall cops probably wouldn’t be too keen on that anyway, I
ended up with a 2D tent instead of the 3D tent I’d wanted. So I sat in my chair and chatted with some of
the other people there until my brother arrived and dropped off a pup tent.
He was just in time, it turned out, as not five minutes
after I’d set up and moved my stuff inside, a huge storm broke. And it rages on unchecked. Rain is drilling the tent with the force of
buckshot and the wind, jealous because it can’t even eat delicious buffalo
wings, is doing its best to make sure the rain blows at an angle that propels it
up and into the tent. But no force of
man or nature can deter me. I am
impervious to the fury of the storm. I
will have wings, I will have them of no cost, and I will have them for a year.
Updates to follow.
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