Adventures in Bonnaroo land

(Thought I published this last night, whoops! Will finish later)

4 pillows, 3 camping chairs, 2 tents and 1 broken cell phone later I have returned home from Bonnaroo. It was an amazingly awesome experience and if you ever have $250 extra dollars (plus transportation, gas, food, and beer money) laying around combined with the ability to take a 5 day vacation, I highly, highly recommend it. I saw part or all of 20+ bands in 4 days and it was fucking fantastic, though pretty exhausting at the same time. So for anyone interested, here's the breakdown. Word to the wise, this will probably be stupidly long since my blog window is so narrow (and a hell of a lot happened). Sorry.

Wednesday night: Me, my brother and my boyfriend (here on out referred to as "the boy") hit the road in our upgraded 2009 Silverado around 11 o'clock at night. We had initially rented a full size vehicle (a Nissan something or other is what they would of given us) but due to the joys of renting from urban Enterprise locations they neglected to actually have the car on site when we showed up for our reservation. Options were to be driven up to another lot for our full size car or take the quad cab truck at the same price. We went with the truck. The plan was to drive through the night to hit Manchester, TN around 7 am. Brother (who is a bartender and used to working nights) would take the first shift and wake me up when he started to fall asleep and I would lead us in. I crashed out in the back, unable to sleep, while he drove through what ended up being torrential downpours all through Indiana at half our intended speed. We ended up hitting the entrance line around 9:30ish instead.

Thursday: Then came the 4 hour, idle slowly, use the "park" gear often, and drink beer section of the drive. People would get out, roam around, throw Frisbees, all while we slowly inched our way to the coveted farm land. As we were getting ready to roll in it started raining again making for a pretty damp and rushed tent pitching party later on. The gates to get in took awhile because they search every car for glass (no glass at all is allowed, which turns out to be a pretty damn smart idea after all the shoes I saw lost throughout the weekend) and drugs. We of course made it through a-okay. Orange flags and volunteers led us to our parking spot which is also your campsite and we raced through claiming our territory. Not much that we wanted to see was happening Thursday and we were all pretty exhausted so since the rain had let up we decided to just wander in to the music area and get a feel for the place. The boy had one band he wanted to catch at 7 so we had plenty of time. The walk from our campsite to the actual music festival grounds was quite a hike. We ended up being pretty much at the back of the whole camping area (if I can scan a copy of the map at some point I will try and show you where).

..............................

Okay as I'm typing in this format I'm realizing this is going to take forever but I don't really want to start over so I'm switching how I present this weekend.

First Music - some of these I saw the entire show, some I just hung out for a few moments, and some I basically could only hear since I was so far back.

Thursday: MURS

Friday: Gomez, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Ani DiFranco, Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Phish, Public Enemy, Girl Talk

Saturday: Bon Iver, Of Montreal, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, NIN, Yeasayer, moe, Ben Harper (those last four I really only saw between 5-15 minutes of each, it was the end of the night and I was freaking beat)

Sunday: Erykah Badu, Snoop Dogg, Phish

Favorite musical moments: Watching Bruce come on stage at the end of the first half of the Sunday night set of Phish and play Mustang Sally and Glory Days with Trey and the band. Ani DiFranco (always, always wonderful), seeing Justin rock the fucking house with Bon Iver (I used to hang out camping with that guy, it was weird to see so many screaming fans for him!) and watching 40,000 white kids clap off beat to Snoop.

Biggest let downs: Missing half of Grace Potter wandering around trying to find brother and boy. Dragging my dancing ass out of Phish to find out Public Enemy basically played the same concert as when I saw them at Pitchfork last summer ("For the second to last time ever we're going to play It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in it's entirety!")

How I worked it: Basically I would hang out around camp till the first band I wanted to see started then hike down to Centeroo (the music area of the farm) and stay there all damn day (longest was Friday, went in at noon for Gomez and got back to tent around 4 am). This led to not a lot of beer drinking because I found it expensive and unnecessary to drink $6 Budweiser's all day. In the end this was probably a good thing since because of that I actually remember most of the weekend.

Lost and Found and other broken items: I only got lost once. Friday night I was on my own (we mostly all split up all weekend) and as stated previously had been out since around noon. I was hoping to catch Girl Talk for awhile as my last set of the night but by 3:15 a.m. I was done (they were supposed to start at 2:15 but didn't get going till about 3). I tried to head back the way I thought my camp was and ended up wandering around for close to an hour. Luckily I didn't get too freaked out about it which is pretty damn big for me who often can panic when lost in the dark in a field in a foreign state.

My phone was in my back pocket all day Thursday and when a late night major thunderstorm caught me out and about I think it finally gave up on me. Friday morning when I went to open it it was obviously water logged (the screen was all kinds of fucked up) so I took it apart in an attempt to dry it and left it alone. Tried it again on Monday and it was a no go. I now have a replacement phone being shipped to hopefully arrive in 2 days or so. Yay for insurance I guess.

General Atmosphere: The place was filled with stoned out kids as you probably already imagined. In the beginning I felt a bit old (and a lot sober) but I got over it pretty quick. For the most part everyone was pretty passive (when you're that high trying to fight is not even conceivable) and with only beer being sold inside Centeroo it kept things low key.
.....................
Yikes lightning is flashing around me in my apartment so I'm going to jump off this ancient beast I claim is a computer. I'll try and come back later and finish it off!