My favorite Radiant adventure (to date) happened during New York's CMJ festival in October, 2006. We drove down from Boston, parked our van at The Hero Factor's hotel in New Jersey and, through a series of events involving a busload of Haitians and a man urinating on the subway, we found our way to Greenwich Village at about 10pm.
We met our friends in a bar smaller than your average elevator, and crammed the entire band, The Bear (road manager) and Lance (good times coordinator), in the door. Lance did his job well as the good times rolled until about 4am.
The next day, seeing as it was our first time in NYC, we helped ourselves to a tour of Manhattan. At 10pm, we took the subway back to New Jersey, and got back in the bus full of Haitians. Only this was the wrong Haitian bus. We appealed to the driver to turn around, but instead he kicked us out.
So there we were, stranded in New Jersey in the middle of the night. Thanks to The Bear's inner GPS, we could at least walk in the right direction. After a few miles, we realized we had entered a freeway's on-ramp. We then realized that the freeway had a large wall in place of a shoulder. The night had reached rock bottom. At least that's what we thought until we stared into the flashing lights of the police car that was pulling us over.
After a brief explanation, the officer ruled out what I thought were the obvious solutions: offer better directions or offer a ride. In a stroke of genius he shouted "I'm gonna turn on my lights and you guys walk in front of my car!"
The six of us walked single file in the slow lane of a 6-lane Freeway for about a mile, until we reached the safety of our beloved van. That was one of the craziest adventures we ever had.
NEXT TIME ON ADVENTURES IN RADIANT: how the Chicago police thought we were attempting to blow up the Sears Tower.
