My friend Sandy Autry, aka Hootie Que is a bit of a rarity on the competition circuit; he is a solo cook, a self-proclaimed One Man Wolfpack. At some of the larger events though, a little help is needed when your cook site is a quarter mile from the turn-in table. And so Sandy asked me to run his boxes for the Evans Georgia contest. After all, every Superhero deserves a sidekick, right?
This contest is part of the Banjo-B-Que festival held Memorial Day weekend. They had some good bands I would like to see, and my camper was in the shop for a week of warranty work, so why not drive over to Augusta for a couple days, I figured. As usual, outdoor events inspire Mother Nature to release the most devious weather from her magic bag, so Evans was “blessed” with a foot or so of rain that weekend.
What do you get when you put a hundred trucks and trailers plus a few thousand people into a saturated field? A fine buffalo wallow, that’s what. Friday it rained on an off throughout the evening making it tough to enjoy the headliner act, Old Crow Medicine Show, but I was able to catch a bit of their set. On Saturday, the clouds cleared for most of the day, allowing at least your torso to stay dry. From the waist down, not so much.
