Bonnaroo 2009 - Part 1: Thursday

Wow.

That's my main reaction after coming home from the 4-day long drug/music binge that is Bonnaroo.

The largest American music festival in the festival circuit, Bonnaroo, is located in Manchester, Tennessee, a whopping 13 hour drive from Baltimore. Yet, I drove the whole way there. Bad idea. I did not drive the whole way back, for sure. Here for you now is a fairly accurate account of my times.

So, we left at about midnight on Thursday (That's Wednesday into Thursday) and we left with a cooler absolutely filled with beer and water, which was really unnecessary as we ended giving at least 50% of the beer away. I personally did not drink very much there. This drive was so very long, and very spooky. The whole way until about 10am was very foggy. About two hours into the drive brought on the spookiest thing I have seen in some time. As a born Catholic, religious symbols highlighted in fields typically don't faze me, but in Virginia, we drove past something that was terrifying. Absolutely horrifying, in fact. The fog was thick around three humongous, skeletal crosses that were in the middle of an otherwise empty clearing. A bright beam of light illuminated the middle cross, reminding me of the scene in The Lord of the Rings when the green light shoots up in the air, signalling the return of the Witchking. Totally scary. So afterwards, we get to a Huddle House around 7:30 for breakfast, which rocked, since we could smoke cigarettes inside, which I did, for novelty's sake.

We got to Manchester, TN at about 12:15 Central Time. For some reason we had to drive down I-81 through Georgia for a few miles. Georgia police are terrifying, they were jacking people left and right. The 10 miles before Manchester are kinda nuts as well, with the police picking off all sorts of people, it's enough to drive a man crazy. Getting through the line into Roo took THREE HOURS. That was the worst, we were all exhausted from the drive down and still had to keep waiting. Once we got in, the Bonnaroo security guys ask if you have glass bottles, or drugs, or anything bad, and we did not. Except for some glowsticks. They found the glowsticks, said "Oooh, glowsticks" and threw them back into the car. We had made it.

We got to our campsite, about a seven-minute walk from Centeroo, which is where the stages and tents are located. We set up camp and didn't really do too much, other than trying to find "Shake Down Street" which is where the drugs are sold and all that nonsense. The first guy I saw was a huge black guy, walking down the street saying "Shrooms and Opium. Shrooms and opium." That was how you found drugs. It was really an interesting phenomena, especially because no one cared. I sparked my first spliff of Bonnaroo and waited around the campsite for night to fall, which it did, with the company of a monsoon, and the first night of Bonnaroo was cold and wet, which worried us, but luckily was never repeated.

So ended Thursday of Bonnaroo. Stay tuned for the Friday through Monday report.