Week 8 - Bonnaroo - Manchester, TN

This part of the trip was what Greg was looking forward to most.  Since I'm not a big crowd person, I went along for the ride, but was really happy to have this experience.  We took the VIP route, and were really glad we did.  We had a nice large spot to park our RV, we were really close to walking into Centeroo, amazing clean restrooms, air conditioned tents to chill out when the sun got too intense, special seating at 2 of the stages, VIP line to go through security, and then we also bought the meal plan so we had great food available for lunch and dinner.  

Entrance to Centeroo - is he in heaven or what?

View from the roof of our RV

Bonnaroo is set on a 700 acre farm and over 80,000 people attend the event.  There are 2 large stages and about 10 tents which have a smaller stage.  Centeroo houses dozens of arts and crafts booths, a post office, and other stores.  There are hundreds of food vendors throughout the farm selling anything you can think of.  There was also a beer garden where they sold dozens of micro brews.  There is a comedy club, a cinema which shows older movies, a ferris wheel, an adult swim area, a large water slide as well as other small buildings which provide some shade and somewhere to relax.

Largest stage - this area was filled during an act

The temperature was in the mid 90's all 4 days, and in the mid 70's at night, so sleeping wasn't bad.  During the day, the heat was pretty unbearable and you had to drink a ton of water to stay hydrated.  The dust got so bad that you had to wear a bandana around your face so you could breath.  Everyone attending was so nice it was amazing.  We made tons of friends and really had a good time.  As our friend Neil would say "we were pressing the flesh". 



The general admission camping area was horrific.  Tents of every different size and shape were set up one on top of another.  No room to move around and probably really hot.  Some people had a 50 minute walk into Centeroo.  Considering the way that over 60,000 people were living during these 4 days, it is phenomenal that everyone was happy and having a good time.  People dressed in crazy outfits - lots of girls were fairies.  25% of the girls wore bathing suits the whole time and a small portion of those girls were topless and just painted their breasts.  Guys wore watermelons on their heads and carried large sticks with different things on top.  One guy had a Pee Wee Herman doll on his stick and when he walked it looked like Pee Wee was dancing.  What a hoot!

At about 11:00 p.m. on one of the nights they had 6 skydivers drop in and also tossed out of the plane thousands of these little blue and white twinkly whirlybirds.  From the ground it was beautiful to see all these twinkles in the sky.   Another night they had beautiful fireworks.  Practically every night, people brought these lantern fireworks that would stay lit and fly through the sky - really awesome.

fountain to keep cool

Water station

The crowds during a performance

Now for the main reason we came - the music.  There were so many options that you could run yourself ragged trying to go from stage to stage.  Buffalo Springfield was to have been the highlight for us, but they were a bit disappointing.  Part of the problem was that the mix wasn't right and the crowd was chanting "turn it up", but they really didn't.  They started off with really weak song choices, but then Neil Young stepped up and turned it on so the last half was a crowd pleaser.  We found some great new bands, with Mumford & Sons being our favorite.  Some of the others were Old Crow Medicine Show, Alison Krauss, the Head and the Heart, The String Cheese Incident, and Widespread Panic.  Some of our old time favorites were Robert Plant, Dr. John, and Greg Allman (he was great).  There were dozens of bands playing for the younger crowd which wasn't our style as most of it was rap.  Eminem was the headliner on Saturday night and we went and got showers during that show.  There was a crazy band that played from 2:00 am until 4:30 am  that was so loud it was rattling the windows of our RV.  Not our favorite night for sleeping.

Neil Young on the screen

So all in all, it was fabulous and we are so happy we went. 

These southern storms are nothing to mess with.  On our drive from Manchester to Memphis, we saw a storm approaching and looked at radar to see that 70 mph winds were coming.  We pulled into a Cracker Barrel and this horrible storm came through and pulled down trees and power lines and killed several people.  We're feeling fortunate to have dodged yet another one.   2 days here, including a visit to the Tunica Casino area.