Nothing Gets The Blood Pumping like Getting Stranded in Camden at Midnight!
Last night a couple friends of mine and I went to a Jimmy Buffett concert at the legendary BB&T Pavilion (RIP Susquehanna Bank) in Camden, New Jersey. When most people think of Camden they picture the most crime-ridden city in all of America, and 99% of the time that’s a pretty accurate portrayal of the city. However, the BB&T Pavilion is the one relatively safe-zone in this city. It’s an awesome venue for concerts and it’s easily accessible from both PA and NJ public transportation. Kids from all over the region flock to BB&T every Summer for the wide range of performers that come to the venue, and for the ability to safely drink alcohol in a city who’s cops are waaaaaay too preoccupied to deal with underage drinking. Truthfully, most of the people at BB&T on any given night are solely there for the latter reason, and last night this was especially true for my friends and I.
We are by no means big Jimmy Buffett fans; the four of us collectively probably couldn’t name more than 3 Jimmy Buffett songs off the top of our heads. But we’re nearing the end of our Summers, so we decided to dress up like the biggest Parrotheads in the world and head to Camden with the singular goal of getting plastered together one last time before we go back to school. We accomplished that goal.
One of the saving graces of the shitty public transportation in Philadelphia is that it’s always late. Normally that might not sound like a good thing to most people, but when you’re using your SEPTA ride as a pregame for a concert, you can bet your ass it’s a saving grace. Our train from the suburbs into Camden was delayed about 30 minutes, and in that time we were all able to get a pretty nice buzz on. After that we continued to drink while on the train, and once we got to Camden we met up with another friend of ours to tailgate with him in the parking lot. Once we were all nice ’n’ drunk in the parking lot, we headed into the concert.
Most of the concert is a bit of blur for me, but of the things I can remember (screaming the lyrics to “Margaritaville” and drinking more beer) it was a pretty good time. When the concert ended we all went our separate ways. Our sober friend took his car back down to the Jersey Shore for the weekend, and my friend Jack, and I were left in Camden on our own.
So we hopped in an uber to what we thought was the nearest train station, and once we got there we saw this:
Ticket turnstiles. Normally we’d just jump right over one these, but we decided to be decent people and buy just one ticket for the both of us to sneak through. I took a look around and thought the coast was clear, but evidently it was not. We snuck through the turnstile and barely made it 15 feet into the station before a transportation cop flagged us down and made me buy another ticket.
I guess I got a little too mouthy while I was in the process of buying that ticket, and even after we fully cooperated with him, he took my ID, ran it through the system, and grilled Jack and I for just long enough s0 that we’d miss our departing train. We were stranded in a sketchy ass Camden train station for the next 40 minutes, and we were more or less dressed like this:
Not exactly blending in with the Camden crowd to say the least. We were both still drunk enough to remain outwardly calm, but on the inside we were fucking panicking. We were the only 2 people in the entire station coming from the Jimmy Buffett concert, because as it turns out we were not at the closest station to BB&T — we were at one of furthest and most dangerous stations in Camden, aaaaand it was midnight. We knew we stuck out like sore thumbs so to avoid drawing attention to ourselves, we sat on a bench as far away as possible from the other people in the station. We even thought about going to find that cop again just in case anything were to happen, but thankfully, we made it out of there unscathed.
Our train showed up on time, and we had about 20 minutes to make it from the New Jersey public transport onto a SEPTA train in Philly. We should’ve been able to make that trip in no rush whatsoever, but of course our Camden train had a delayed stop in the one station between us and Philly due to police activity. We arrived in Philly with 6 minutes to spare before our SEPTA train arrived, and of course the SEPTA station was exactly 6 minutes away from where we were.
So in our Hawaiian shirts, khaki shorts, and flip flops, we took off running down the streets of Philadelphia. If we missed this train we would’ve been stranded in Philly all night, so we literally ran like our lives depended on it. We probably looked like a scene out one of those shitty, buddy action-comedy movies, but to us it felt like something straight out of Mission Impossible.
We sprinted to the SEPTA station and it made it there in exactly 6 minutes, just in time for the train. We got aboard, sat down, caught our breaths, and immediately started talking about how fucking wild all of that was. There really is no better way to get your blood pumping than by getting stranded in a dangerous Camden station, and then sprinting through the streets of Philadelphia in flip flops to catch the last train home!
The entire ordeal wasn’t at all what I envisioned doing last night, but it was a hell of an adrenaline rush and a story that Jack and I will remember forever.
And you know what they say… “it’s not an adventure until something goes wrong.”
