By Colin Quinn (@Quinny3LTD on Instagram & Twitter)
Living in Nashville, Tennessee, you hear a lot about Bonnaroo, the Roo code, and the environment and love that the festival generates are infectious, and that is all before you even step foot on the festival grounds. As many festival goers do, the first order of business was to create a Bonnaroo Spotify playlist that would get us excited for all the music to come. Once the most important task had been finished and a 68-song playlist had been born we got to camping.
I had been to the two other “major festivals” before, Coachella and Lollapalooza, however my camping experience only extended to my Coachella experiences. With Manchester, Tennessee being a completely different landscape and climate, we wanted to be sure we were prepared. We started at the source itself, Bonnaroo’s main website. There they had a page that listed essentials and non-essentials that proved to be extremely beneficial. We were sure to bring every single item listed on the essentials list, which included what most people would think to be common sense items: a tent, tarp, cooler, sunscreen, and other items of that nature. Aside from that, it was mainly just our personal items and clothing, we tried to keep it as simple as possible. However, since my group consisted of 5 people, 3 of which had never camped at a festival before, there were plenty of duplicates and items that seemed nonsensical that were attempted to be thrown into the pile. So my first recommendation to my future self would be to meet up with all of the people in my group to sort through the necessities before attempting to place items in a car, many people have differing opinions on what essentials are and no one wants to be away from an experience like Bonnaroo longer than necessary.
We left Thursday evening around 5:30, most of us are law school students who work 9 – 5 in the summer so getting off work can prove to be a difficult task. Once we got on the road the spirit of Roo seemed to consume the car. From Nashville, Manchester is only about an hour away but the entire car ride you couldn’t go more than two minutes without people jamming, waving, or shouting “Happy Roo.” There had been rumors the night before that there was a 12-hour wait time just to get into the campsite for the festival. With this in mind, we had plenty of snacks, good music, and good spirits to get through what we anticipated to be a long wait. When we got to the exit for Bonnaroo, to our surprise it was closed and we were being routed to an alternate exit, which was 17 miles further down the road (uh oh). So for the next 15 minutes, we certainly started to get nervous, maybe the rumors were true, where could we possibly be going that is 17 miles away from the campsite?
We finally got to the exit and started following the signs. Many of these signs specifically requested that we ignore all instructions from our GPS and only follow the signs (our millennial hearts sank). However, the way that we went took us down a beautiful winding country backroad. We were surrounded by beautiful trees, sunny skies, and farm houses as far as the eye could see. Once we had completed the 25 minute detour, we arrived at the festival gates. Many of us believed that we were wrong to follow the signs, there was no cars, no wait, we must have had the wrong entrance. To our surprise we had the right place, the security guards welcomed us with smiles, high-fives, and plenty exclamations of “Happy Roo.” They went through the standard car check that I had experienced before at Coachella, step out of the car, check bags that are easily accessible for glass or other prohibited items, while officers were roaming the check-in area with dogs to pick up anything the human eye could not. After a short 2 to 5 minute check, we were free to go.
The campsites itself were around 7 by 11 feet, however it felt like it was a lot more space than that. We were comfortable and felt like we truly had our own space. We decided to have a set up that gave us a living space that was it’s own for us to all hang out and we kept our three tents on the other side of the campsite. Having this kind of separation was perfect for our group. We felt we had a space dedicated to being comfortable and sleeping, and another space specifically for socializing and being a part of the Bonnaroo experience.
The very first thing we did, after setting up our campsite was introducing ourselves to our neighbors. While in our heads we thought we must have lucked out and had the best group of people around us, I believe that Bonnaroo just brings it out of you. Next to us we had a group of friends from St. Louis, Missouri, two guys who worked for a radio station in Mississippi, and two guys from Houston, Texas. If it was not for Bonnaroo we would have never met these people, what other type of environment would bring us all to a place where we were neighbors for a weekend? Another one of the beautiful parts of Bonnaroo.
From day one we made an effort to include our neighbors in everything we did. We pregamed the festivals with them, we shared music, our friends from Houston cooked for us, anything the others needed we all provided with each other. Our experience was only enhanced by seeing each other happy, I guess that’s just another aspect of Roo. In other festivals, we all co-existed yet still were focused on seeing our favorite artists and putting our own comfort first, not Roo. This was a placed where you sacrificed for your friends first, because if those you love aren’t happy how can you truly enjoy Roo? Another example of this was in how we chose to see certain artists. My girlfriend and I had mapped out our day so we could listen to ODESZA in the distance but get a chance to eat and explore the rest of what Roo has to offer. But when our friends from Texas mentioned to us that not only they hadn’t seen ODESZA but this would be their introduction to electronic music we dropped everything we were doing to give them the most incredible experience Roo could offer. We brought them drinks, found them the best place we could get to at mainstage, and let ODESZA take the rest. Seeing their eyes light up and experience what we know to be an incredible moment, seeing ODESZA for the first time made Roo that much more special. If I had to do it again, I would absolutely miss all the other artists and my main chance to eat just to see their eyes light up.
One other aspect of Roo that I feel was interesting to point out was the amount of forgiveness. I know what you’re probably thinking, what the hell does that mean? So let me explain. Our first night on Thursday when we were all going to sleep we heard some voices outside of the tent from one of our neighbors which is completely normal for any camping festival. But then we started to hear them rise, which was a little alarming, this wasn’t normal. The next thing we hear is complete chaos, items around the camp were getting tossed, and bodies were thrashing around. You guessed it, girl fight. When we got out of the tent the only thing we see is one girl on top of the other holding her by the throat, both bleeding, both fuming mad, not what you would expect from Roo or really any festival.
That next morning we were expecting some really awkward tension amongst the surrounding campsites. To my surprise, the first thing I see after stepping out of my tent was the exact two girls that were fighting, laughing, hugging, and joking about their tussle the night before. Jokes of bringing John Cena in for the next round and making a real wrestling ring out of their campsite. Relief was certainly the first thing that swept over me to see that they were okay and in good spirits but then next thing I saw was also pretty encouraging the people whose campsites ended up being the victim of their hustle were there too, laughing about the destruction that ensued the night before. No hard feelings, just talking about the first set they were all going to see together that day. Again, no one wanted to bring anyone else down, they wanted to make Roo as special as they could for all those around them.
The remainder of the festival experience was extremely low maintenance. The weather warmed up and with that brought the desire for as much air and sun protection as we possibly could get. Sleeping in past sunrise proved to be fairly difficult even with adequate shade. What myself and the rest of the camp decided to do was miss out on some of the later sets in order to attack our final two days with as much energy and excitement as we could. To some this sounds crazy, why would you miss out on the acts you wanted to see? For us, the pro’s and con’s made sense. Get an extra three hours of sleep and wake up with the sun, excited to greet Bonnaroo with as much energy as we possibly could, was the best thing we could’ve done.
Part of the reason we made that decision was that for us, camping was as fun and exciting as any other part of the festival. Because we had grown so close to the campers around us it became almost a festival within a festival. Because we brought a massive speaker (which I absolutely would recommend), I knew signal would be sparse so I downloaded as much music from Spotify and SoundCloud onto my phone as I possibly could. This proved to be one of the best decisions we could’ve made. We played music for essentially 10 campsites around us, we had people coming up to us throughout the day asking us “what song is that?”, “My campsite can’t hear it man, please turn it up!” Our camp became the center of our little sector of Plaza 11. With this shared experience and love of music at the campsite, it made our experience better than we ever could have imagined. Our neighbors brought cups, ping pong balls, snacks, playing cards, you name it. So the saying goes “build it and they will come” and they came out in force.
This emphasis on making our campsite an attraction, not only saved us money (by not spending it elsewhere in the festival), but it made our experience feel as authentic to Roo as I could’ve imagined. This is the first time I had ever felt that camping was truly as much a part of the festival as the music was. While at Coachella it felt as if the campsite was just somewhere you spent in between sets, at Roo the campsite is the set that you don’t want to leave.
Being that this was our first Roo, we had always heard what seemed to be tall tales of the all-encompassing feeling of love and freedom that Roo makes you feel. Much like you, who is reading this and likely thinking, “that’s just the feeling of being at a fest” or “I felt the same thing when I was at (insert festival name here)” please trust me when I say, there is nothing like Roo. Even as I write this, I am realizing that there is no tangible way to put the feeling of Roo into words. Any explanation I may be able to give would surely fall short, and while I can likely explain to you the joys and experiences of Roo with some accuracy for hours on end, there will always be that feeling that connects everything and binds it all together. Don’t believe me? I guess you’ll have to come find me at Roo next year and see for yourself.
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