RockyGrass Recap (part 1)

Our first stop as official, full-time travelers? RockyGrass. For those of you who don’t know, RockyGrass is an amazing bluegrass festival that takes place every July in Lyons, CO. We’ve been going since 2009 and every year seems like the best ever.

Even though we used to live just down the road (fun fact: we bought that house because of its proximity to Lyons) we have camped every year since 2010. RockyGrass is its own universe, like living in a friendly, bluegrass bubble, and once I’m there I don’t want to leave.

Camping is a big deal for this festival – we tried to camp “on-site,” but that works via lottery and we were denied. What does on-site look like? A little like this:

Yeah, it’s crowded. And getting in there is kind of a nightmare for anxious people like me. But (in my opinion) the best after-hours picks happen on-site. Of course, if you go to bed early, on-site is NOT for you. On Sunday morning I was told about a pick that went on until 7am.

We camped at Riverbend again this year, which I mentioned in my last post. Camping is pretty tight there as well…

Riverbend is also home to a collection of tiny houses. WeeCasa, billed as “Colorado’s first tiny home hotel,” WeeCasa consists of about 20 or so tiny houses of different shapes and sizes.

They offer tours, but we got a little busy with bluegrass, so we had to settle for peeking in a couple of windows.

A little bit more about camping at RockyGrass. At some point (Thursday?) I called my parents to let them know we closed on the house, etc. My dad asked me something about my camera, and I said “I don’t know, it’s back at the tent.” This was met with dead silence. My dad knows my camera wasn’t cheap and he seemed to be a little shocked that I’d just leave it unattended like that.

But here’s the thing: first, there is probably tens of thousands of dollars of equipment sitting around the RockyGrass campgrounds. Tents, chairs, tables, cookstoves… the list goes on. People bring a lot of stuff with them! And then there’s the instruments. RockyGrass is widely known as a picker’s festival – so there are lots of instruments sitting around as well.

So yeah, there’s lots of expensive stuff. But RockyGrass is a bubble, a little universe that exists outside of normal reality. I mean, where else would you smile and wave at a nice couple walking down the street with their little boy… only to realize that the couple is Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck (with their little boy Juno)?

A fine example of that “little universe” mentality of RockyGrass? A cell phone charging station, full of phones. Nobody was watching them. Everyone just trusted everyone else.

But I’ll tell you a little story that I think illustrates the RockyGrass mentality best. We brought along both of our solar chargers. One, by Voltaic Systems, is a good-sized panel charger with a battery, and we use it to charge the phones and the laptop. The other, by Revel Gear, is attached to a string of lights.

We wrapped the lights around our tent so that it would be easy to spot after dark.

On Friday, we left the chargers sitting out to charge in the sun. And at some point on Friday, it rained. A lot. We were on-site at the time, and Michael and I wondered if we should run back to camp and move the chargers. We figured we’d never make it in time and decided to hope for the best. Well, when we got back to camp – easily found with our awesome lights –

We found that our chargers and our chairs had been placed inside the rainfly of our tent. Wow! We found out the next day that our “Yanni neighbors” (so called because of this sign at the edge of their camp) figured we wouldn’t want our stuff to get all wet.

And that’s what it’s like to camp at RockyGrass.

Of course there was music! But I think I’ll save that for another post. I’ll share this picture with you as a teaser, though: