Day Two, continued

Day Two of the Great Adventure culminated in us entering Bonnaroo. After an entire day in the car, Rob and I were grumpy and tired. We also only had about 2 gallons of gas. The empty light came on sometime in line and we refused to lose our spot to get gas! We got our car checked for contraband items and surrendered our front bike tires at the gate, both of which were nerve wracking experiences. We had plenty of glass bottles, which are prohibited, two of which I can think of off hand as being vital to the success of the trip: sesame oil and whiskey. Thankfully the checker man was satisfied by taking our pickles, olives and one of our two jars of peanut butter. Then I had to scurry across multiple lanes of traffic to get to a fence to lock our tires, hopefully to see them again in a few days. Deep breath, wristbands on and away we go to find our camping spot.

I was pretty curious to see how they managed organizing that many people into campsites. Basically, they just ushered us into a slightly spread out parking lot formation with about 20feet between rows. We then set up camp in front of our car. Thankfully, the people beside us didn't have a tent (car sleepers), so it was okay that we unpacked two giant tent like structures. One was Rob's car camping tent, the other was an even bigger sun shelter with mesh sides. It is about seven of my paces across and so large Rob and I can barely move it once it is up. Amusingly enough, we managed to get it set up in the dark for the first time ever without instructions in less than 15 min. Not too shabby.

So now our house is set up and we are ready to go to the festival, granted it is about 10:30pm at this point and all the shows we wanted to see are over. We make our way towards Centeroo (where the music happens) and the people watching begins. Many people who didn't have to wait in line for eight hours have had their fill of the festival for the day and are heading, bleary-eyed, back to their corner of the tent city. We wander about the festival for a while, just to see what we came cross-country to see, but quickly call it a night because we aren't interested in the bands that play the wee hours of the night. As I'm sure I will describe in more depth later, there are people everywhere. Many are sleeping in the grass, or passed out, it's hard to tell the difference. But we head home.

If only we knew where home was! We had a map, but we had no idea where we set up our tent. The tent cities were divided into sections, but everything looked the same, so we had to take a guess. We decided to walk towards section 8 because we remembered seeing a tall balloon marked with an eight on it. We quickly realized 8 was no where near where we remembered leaving our house. So then we just wandered in the general direction of where we though home could be. It was fairly difficult at this point because we both wanted to be home and asleep and done with this bearish day, but we were lost. Finally we found the road we came in on, but there was a fence in our way. I remembered a ghetto fence crossing down the way so we went commando style through someone else's tent city for a while. Robert didn't like this plan, but I was determined. Robert opted to head back to the road to find a proper path, I continued stubbornly with my plan. A few minutes later I triumphantly found the fence crossing and found our tent city, then a while later stumbled upon our tent. Alone. Robert was still out there somewhere, but I just had to wait and hope that he could find his way home too. Eventually he did, with the valuable knowledge of how to use roads to get to and from the festival, but I was done at that point and we both grumpily got into our sweltering tent.

(a good night's sleep did us well, as we awoke ungrumpified with no hard feelings)