Bonnaroo is a weekend-long, camping-based music festival based in an otherwise-obscure town outside of Nashville, and right now, it’s very happy to greet us.
We landed in Manchester, Tennessee at around 7:00 in the morning for check-in, and it’s now getting close to 5:00pm. We haven’t left the car yet, but instead, find ourselves at mile marker 126: a good five or six markers beyond the festival’s entrance – all of which we’ve crawled in the car, one inch at a time. And I should hardly complain – compared to the journeys of most everyone else attending, St. Louis is a paltry 6 hour drive.
Saying I haven’t left the car yet isn’t entirely accurate. I did get up a few times – once to grab a snack from our reserves in the trunk, a few Chinese fire drills, once to crack into our stores of whiskey and rum. I decide get out and knock on the door of the Winnebago behind us in line – Matt, Adam, Greg, and Danny (below, clockwise from the top) are from upstate New York, and they’ve been on the road since 12pm yesterday. Adam’s the only Bonnaroo veteran of the bunch, and says he’s looking forward to the Local Natives set, and that one of his favorite Bonnaroo activities is going around and trying to hawk made-up drugs to people (“You want an eighth of Crystal Clear Pepsi?” he offers).
The DJ at Bonnaroo’s radio station urges folks to be understanding and have fun – and given the conditions of everyone’s arrival, it’s hard to imagine anyone in a disposition to throw a fit. Some even take advantage of the snail’s pace and get in a football or Frisbee catch while their cars stall on the highway shoulder. Compared to what we’d have in store for us at the campgrounds (and we’ll talk about that later), one might even consider lulling along in the air-conditioned car along the tranquil road to be quite pleasant.
At long last we make our way through the gates, past the waves of already-pitched tents and to our plot. We’re immediately off to the races – the media tent has free burgers and beer at 6, and we’ll need a fair amount of both if want to have any hope of making it out beyond dark. I soon find myself leaning on a demo car at the Fiesta Movement tent, overlooking Neon Indian’s set from afar. A clearly inebriated concert-goer approaches and asks, “Is this your car? Will you sell it to me?” “No,” I reply, “but if you come back in twenty minutes, I’ll have a batch of Crystal Clear Pepsi with your name on it.”
