No, I'm not going to talk about how I napped for a good portion of our 12 hour journey to Manchester. There is a story here, I promise. We drove down to Bowling Green Kentucky to sleep before we finished the trek to TN. In the car I rode there was Keith, a roommate of mine, Jeanne and Sam, they are dating and I have met them both before, and Conner, I never met him before this. I will share some pictures later to put some faces to these names. Why drive to Kentucky? Another guy, Casey, knows this other guy, Ron (we called him Rex or Tex the whole weekend) who lives on a farm in Bowling Green, KY. We were meeting Casey's car there so that we could all drive into Roo together so that our cars would be near each other. None of us knew Rex in my car, so we weren't sure how this would turn out.
Back to the drive real quick. It's a nice drive down. Easy, it's 4 different highways that pass right through a bunch of major cities: Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, and lastly Nashville. It was super cool to see the skylines and the stadiums. The stadiums tended to be right on the highway. I think it was Cincinnati that we essentially turned a corner and then, BAM, right in the middle of the city. Didn't even see it coming. But that is as exciting as the ride down gets. Now onto Kentucky.
I believe we got into KY around 2 or 3 a.m. Everyone in my car got a bed to sleep in, it was awesome. I passed out as soon as I laid down, surprise surprise. Others took a few hours to actually get to bed. We were woken up around 7 a.m. to the other car turning on the lights in the basement and yelling for us all to wake up. This car consisted of Evan, Jill, Casey, and Allie, again, there will be pictures so names and faces match. Allie was from Philly, I think everyone else went to Fredonia at some point or another. Now we have a crew to continue on to TN. This farm we were on was pretty cool. My sister would have liked it. They had six horses that Jill and Allie fed. Three of the horses were Arabs and two were Quarters. I forget what the last one was. I'm not a horse person, so I don't know entirely what that means either, but I do know that horse people know exactly what I'm talking about, or at least I hope they do. Rex's mom took a group picture of us. Later, we ended up catching brunch at a diner down the road. Bomb-ass food for not too much money. When the check came, Rex paid for it, none of us expected that to happen, at all. We were all surprised and very grateful for this. Southern hospitality is a real thing.
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| Photo by Jeanne |
And so we were on our way.....to a lake to go cliff jumping! Casey said it was his tradition to go cliff jumping at this lake before Bonnaroo. He was our seasoned Bonnaroo vet. He had been there twice before I think, so we continued his tradition and did the whole cliff jumping thing. This was a big lake right outside Nashville. Looking at a map, I'd say it's J. Percy Priest Lake. We drove into the area and there were signs saying that there were objects submerged and it wasn't safe to jump or dive, but he said he had done it before. We walk on. We parked and then had to hike a little bit upwards to get to this cliff. We say people jumping off of one rock into the water, but this was not our destination. We finally get to the top of this hill and go over to the cliff's edge. The water isn't clear, so we don't know if there are any rocks or anything beneath the water. Casey threw a rock down, it fell for awhile. Then the idea of going into the lake and swimming over to check to see if it's safe was getting thrown around. No one did that.
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| Photo By Jeanne |
Allie ended up going to that group of people we saw before and asking them. She said that they said it was alright to jump. Allie stripped down to her bikini, and then she jumped! She has some big cojones if you ask me. Jumping was no cake walk. The rocks made this sort of long step fiasco. You know those kind of stairs that is that awkward length where its a long one step but a short/weird two step. The rock was set up like that. You had to clear the brush and jump out away from the cliff because who knows what is at the base. No easy task with the whole I'm jumping off a cliff frame of mind. So, Allie was fine, said it was awesome. Then Casey jumped, followed by a couple other people. When Sam jumped, he was kind of close to the edge, but I think it looked worse than it was. Now it was my turn. I took my first step, then my second step, then I planted my left foot at the edge of the cliff, checked up my speed and did a two footed broad jump (for you AP readers). Not gonna lie, I was nervous, but went for it. You gotta want it. As I was falling, there was enough time to think about what was going on. I was looking down at the water thinking, "alright when does the water come." I soon realized that looking down at the water is going to hurt my face, so I looked back up and then hit the water. The falling sensation was unreal. My adrenaline was rushing, whole body shaking. It took while for me to realize I just jumped off a cliff. The fall was a solid three count. Close your eyes and count 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi nice and slowly. A lot can be thought about in 3 seconds. We climbed back to the top, no easy climb again. There had to be strategic placing of you feet to make sure you wouldn't slip. After we got back up, we jumped again. Rex jumped in the second round. He had to get changed first. I didn't see him jump, but I heard his landing. There was a huge splash this splash must have lasted for at least a second. I thought it was done at one point, and it just continued. The water crashing on water. I wonder if he did a cannonball. That would have most likely have given him an enema of some sort.
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| Photo By Jeanne |
After all of the jumping, we decided to go to that smaller cliff to jump off of it and do tricks and things. Enough adrenaline pumping for one day. We got to the little jumping area and I didn't really even want to jump. We just jumped off a 40 foot cliff. 10 feet just wasn't appealing anymore. Most everyone else did do some more jumping. I was drying off and didn't really need to get wet again. We met some more nice people on this rock who were jumping. They were asking about the big cliff. We simply said it was awesome and safe mostly because we were all standing before them. This group seemed a little younger than us, but who's to know for sure. My age gauge is out the window through four years in college. We asked these new friend to take a group photo of us and then we were on our way. We all walked back to the car, dried off and Sam and Casey planned our route to Bonnaroo.
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Photo by Jeanne
Left Front: Rex, Conner, Keith, Jeanne, Allie, Casey
Left Back: Myself, Sam |
All of this extra delaying was because the gates to Bonnaroo were not supposed to open until 7 p.m. We did have to go to will call also because Jeanne had her wrist band sent to the wrong place , Conner had just purchased his ticket the day we left for Roo, and Evan put his wristband on when he got it. If you don't read the Bonnaroo booklet they give you, it's very easy to make this mistake. It says to not put your wristband on, the people at the gate will put it on for you. There was no line at will call and we delayed some more. Eventually, we got in line for Bonnaroo and it didn't take long to get in at all. We were in and parked a half hour after we got in the line. The gates were opened early.
Some people were nervous about security, but it was not bad at all. We got out of the car, they asked if we had glass, and we were on our way. Got our Bonnaroo booklets which included a schedule and a map of the venue. These were nice to keep in pockets to know what was going on at all times. We finally made it to Bonnaroo!! The excitement here was high. On the way in we drove by cars with windows painted with things like "Going to Roo" "Our friend James went into the Porta-Potty with no shoes one. Honk if you think that's gross." My favorite was in this chain of seven cars. It was car "2/7" that had "Bonna-Reuban Studdard" written on their car. "Fuckin' classic man." For those who know the Mitch Hedberg skit. The sights were just awesome. It was evident that everyone was extremely excited. Our parking spot is in the bottom right portion of the map in Camp M. It's decently far from Centeroo, but not too bad. We made it to Roo and were parked at 6 p.m. A little sidenote, Manchester TN is in central time.
