Monday, April 20, 2009

The Coachella Music Festival is located between two small towns in California called Indio and Coachella, near Joshua Tree Nat’l Park. It’s a pretty area with tons of gorgeous palm trees, but it is very strange. We kept getting lost in a vortex of walls and palm trees! Every time we would try to find the city to buy some food or beer, we would lose our sense of direction. The whole place is full of big expensive country club houses behind walls lined with Palm Trees.

Neighborhood after neighborhood, the same thing….lines of palm trees along high walls, protecting the mansions behind them, each subdivision all looking the same. We would turn down street after street and all we would see were these walls and houses and palm trees. Where was the freakin’ town??? It was hilarious that could never tell what direction we were going. We would think we were headed the right way, but no…just more fancy homes behind gates and walls. Crazy rich country club place!

Eventually we did find our way to the section with a gas station and a grocery store.
Mmmmm beer!

The music venue doesn’t open until 11am and since we would start baking in our tent once the sun came up, we had a few hours to kill in the morning to go out in town and chug down some beer. This also helped us avoid spending tons of money to get our buzz on. The cost for a cup of Heineken, the only beer offered at the festival, was $7.00! Since London and I love our beer, we knew we had to go out and buy some cheap stuff or we’d go broke! It was cool though because tons of other people had the same idea. We would grab some beer and tailgate in the parking lot.
The main problem with that though was having to pee. We were pretty funny hiding and ducking between cars , poppin’-a-squat and peeing right there in the parking lot with tons of people walking all around. But it was part of the fun! We’d get nice and tipsy and then head into the venue and jam out to music until midnight.





Music music music…people people people!

Pretty girls in pretty dresses everywhere!

Heineken, Heineken and more Heineken!

Some of the many awesome bands we saw included:



Franz Ferdinand, The Ting Tings, Paul McCartney, Crystal Method, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Joss Stone, Jenny Lewis, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, Ghostland Observatory, Gaslight Anthem, The Cure






We met up with London’s friends Mike and Ryan from San Francisco that she had met last year. They were a lot of fun to hang out with! We went with them to watch Ghostland Obsevatory who I had not known of. They put on an amazing laser show that just blew my mind. It was so fun! Then we chilled on the grass and watched the LED light show display. It was a light sculpture that was at Burning Man…strings of LED lights that lit up different colors in fun patterns that would just flow with the music so well! I could sit and watch that thing for hours and hours!
There were actually a lot of things there that gave Coachella a “Burning Man” feel, especially the Do Lab and the Lucent Dossier Experience. They also had a small temple and a bamboo sculpture that looked just like center camp. Anyway, I enjoyed the “burner” touch that people brought to the festival.

The whole place was awesome. I had such a blast!

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