Bonnaroo: On the Road

It's what I know you've all been waiting for, the start of my mulitple posts on Bonnaroo, followed  by pictures (if I can find where I laid them down, I think they're in my car, I've got to go look).  This post is the on the road post.  Wednesday of last week.

 

Tuesday night I had to work, I got off at six in the morning.  Nick took an extra day of vacation so he was off that night.  He had went to Houma to see his girlfriend and was going to drive up that morning to meet me.  I figured he would probably get here around nine or so, which meant if I rushed home from work, jumped in bed I might get about three hours sleep before he got here.

 

Of course when I got home I had to get on the computer to check things out first, but I was off in about thirty minutes.  Nick called about eight, he was getting here a lot sooner than I thought.  I got up and jumped on the computer, I wanted to try and leave a few posts before he got there.  Instead I surfed around reading some blogs and before I could leave a post on my own Nick was here.

 

We loaded up his car and prepared to head off for our stops before we headed off on the road to Bonnaroo.  We figured if we were on the road by noon it would be cool.  First stop was to head back to work so I could exchange the disposable cameras I had bought the day before for twice what I saw for two disposable cameras we also sold, which I missed.  Of course stopping at work might not have been a good idea, we stood around and talked for awhile, everyone wanting to know when we were leaving...now if you'd let us. 

 

Next stop was Walmart.  We were camping at Bonnaroo and bringing a small grill and had to stop and get some food for us to use on said grill.  We weren't going to get a lot, some hamburgers, hotdogs, drinks and chips.   Which pretty much is what we got.  Actually first we went to Sams and got most of the items.  We needed ketchup and mayo, and didn't feel like buying a big package of them at Sams, so that lead us to Walmart. 

 

After that we had to make another stop at my house.  I had forgot my pillow.  We were using sleeping bags, but I can't sleep with my head flat out with the rest of my body, I need something soft to lay it on. 

 

Finally at noon, we were actually on the road to Bonnaroo.   It was a good drive, I thought I'd sleep part of the way, since I hadn't gotten much sleep, but I ended up staying awake for the entire drive.  Nick has satellite radio so that was cool.  We kept jumping from channel to channel, finding great songs that you just don't hear on the radio.  From oldies to new stuff, it was really good. 

 

We stopped for gas and once to eat.

 

Our plan was to get to Nashville tonight, spend the night, spend most of the next day walking around the city and than heading out to Bonnaroo that afternoon/evening to get in.  It actually didnt' start until Friday, but started letting people in on Thursday.

 

We got into Nashville around eight.  We didn't know that Country Music Fan Fair was the same weekend in Nashville.  This is a country music affair that brings in close to 150,000 people to the city.   So guess what we found at our first stop for a hotel?  You got it, no rooms at the inn.  Than one hotel wanted almost a hundred dollars.  We just wanted to use the room to sleep the night and get up early the next morning to head out, we didn't want to spend that much money on a room.  We ended up having to drive through Nashville and ended up in North Nashville, not in the best section of the town, when we finally discovered a hotel that had rooms and wasn't going to cost a fortune. 

 

By this time it was after ten, so we each took showers and hit the sack pretty quick.  We watched some news and it was weird the attitude the newscasters had about Bonnaroo.  They all talked about it like it was some sort of big drug hippie thing, which admitely it was and is to an extent, but they talked so down on it, I was surprised to hear that type of attitude, I'm sure the event brings a certain amount of money to Nashville, just due to its proximity to the site.  But than they'd mention their fan fair and it was like the second coming.   Which I guess explains a lot right there.

 

Stay tuned for more: Nashville and Bonnaroo coming up!