Bonnaroo, review #1

So, its been a while since I arrived home from Bonnaroo. In the meantime, I’ve moved all of my belongings across town. I had meant to write this earlier, but I knew that it would have to wait until I, one, digested Bonnaroo, two, moved, and three, had some time to think about the Grand Experience, that is, Bonnaroo.

Bonnaroo was awesome.

It really was. Everything in the beginning was kind of lame. I arrived at the festival tired and hungry. It all started out by taking a red eye flight to Dallas through a thunderstorm. Lightning from an airplane above is quite spectacular. I discovered that I don’t enjoy flying through the thunderstorm. We then spent a couple of hours in the Dallas Airport, where my Seattle compatriot, Pat, found an iPod vending machine to feed his credit card to at 5am. The vending machine returned a black 30gb iPod. One horrible sandwich and bottle of water later we were off to Nashville. After arriving at about 9am with the keys to a rented PT Cruiser we were off. The freeway to Manchester was ahead and we were stoked to be on our way. Pat (who prefers the moniker, Jerkface Jones) found some sunglasses en route that had a confederate flag on the side. The positively north westerners were trying to be hicks. Two days later, he scratched the flag off. Bonnaroo may have been in the Bible Belt, but it may as well have been half a world away.

After traversing some traffic and having an officer tell my compatriot to “GET BACK IN THE CAR”, we exited the freeway at the wrong point. We then drove through Manchester, mostly sticking to the center lane bypassing the fools sitting in traffic going nowhere on the side of the road. Eventually we found a WALMART. This was my second time in a WALMART and the first time entering a WALMART with the intention of purchasing anything. We left the WALMART $200 later with lots of beer, bread, peanut butter, jam, and lots of other boring things to keep us going through the unknown. The Holiday Inn was next to pick up the guest passes. After picking the passes up we sat in the parking lot for about an hour while the police officers ate donuts. Some people drove through a lovely old ladies front lawn. She was not too happy about it. After getting on our way we found ourselves in a campground 50 feet front the festival grounds between an RV filled with 20 year olds from New Jersey and a public radio DJ from Louisville, Kentucky.

The kids from New Jersey immediately offered us a beer, “from the oldest brewery in the world.”

… and we were off.