US Festival '83: A generation earlier, the cliche was that if you can remember Woodstock, then you weren't there. I not only can remember US Festival, Day Two, but I was definitely there (with my brother, a good friend, and his girlfriend).
Imagine, hell, heaven and hell again in the same day. The hell was 600K+ people showing up for a festival where parking is 6+ miles away from the fair grounds, and having to walk 6+ miles to the same fair grounds when like four buses show up.
Heaven is seeing Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Triumph, Scorpions and Van Halen back to back to back in an orgiastic, positive-vibe filled mud pit (although, truthfully, Van Halen sucked, as David Lee Roth was too blotto to remember the lyrics in song after song).
You knew definitively that it was a life event.
Hell was desperately climbing through a bus window, and getting separated from our small group, so as to not have to walk miles back to the parking area, only to not be able to find our car or my brother for hours.
This was pre-cell phone days, and the parking area was literally on a dried up lake bed, where our reference marker, a bathroom, got moved from its original point, and we had no reference point in a sea of thousands of cars and many tens of thousands of people.
I will never forget the moment when we actually found one another in that parking lot.
It was every bit as dramatic as the end-sequence in the 1963 animal classic, The Incredible Journey.
I guess that's why they say the journey is the reward.