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For someone who loves music like I do, I jumped on the whole Bonnaroo band wagon a little late.  I first heard about the festival in 2006 and really wanted to go.  Due to my situation lack of money at the time I was unable to make it happen.  This is the first year I was able to go, and it was insanely awesome.

For those who don’t know Bonnaroo is a music festival help each year in a little town called Manchester Tennessee about an hour southeast of Nashville  Manchester is home to a 700 acre “farm” which is where the festival happens.  It’s the largest festival in North America and has showcased some of the most well known bands/music acts in the world since it started in 2002.

Lauren and I bought our tickets in February soon after they went on sale.  The next four months were busy with other activities including a trip to Nashville to see Dave Matthews Band (an obession I am sure I will write about at some point).  Besides my obsessive reading, we didn’t really do much real preparation until about two weeks before the festival.

I took the four month waiting period as a chance to get more acquainted with some of the acts that were scheduled to play.  My favorites going into to Bonnaroo were Phish, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Of Montreal, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, MGMT, The Dirty Guv’Nahs, and Ben Harper and the Relentless7.  I, at one point, had around six MP3 cds with only Bonnaroo acts filling them.  They were taking up every slot in the CD player of the car (no iPod hookup in the Caliber = lame).

Aftour four months of waiting, June was finally here.  Bonnaroo was scheduled for June 11th to the 14th.  The plan was to drive down to Nashville on the 10th, meet up with Tweep @chinacat (thanks to @versadave for posting that she was going too!) and share a hotel room for the night, and then book it down to Manchester early morning of the 11th.  The plan went almost flawlessly.  We met Sonya shortly after she got to the hotel and had a nice dinner at PMin Nashville, highly recommend it if you are ever in town.  Lauren and I woke up at 5:30am on the 11th and headed down to Manchester. 

Shakedown Street

We got off I-24 at around 6:45am and got in line to get in the farm.  It took us around two hours to get through the line, get the car searched and get to our camping spot.  We ended up getting really lucky with our camping spot.  We could walk to Centeroo where all the shows were in less than 10 minutes.  So sites are over an hour walk.  We were also located about 30 yards off of Shakedown Street, where many of the food and wares vendors are located.

Breakdown of the actual festival coming soon!