Picking up from the last post we had just spent the night in Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area. The next morning we drove out of the canyon and just hours later crossed the Oregon border. This trip called for some intense grocery shopping! The worst one was the day before the festival. Buying food for 7 people to last a week was a bit of a challenge. Not just figuring the amounts we needed to buy but fitting it in the truck. After an hour of standing in the parking lot trying different ways of packing WE GOT IT. Off to our Air BnB. We thought it might be nice to stay in a warm bed before a week of festival camping.
The Air BnB was amazing and we highly recommend you stay at this Off the Grid Ranch.
Click the picture below to check availability and get in contact with Bonnie!
The next day we planned to pick up three more friends who flew in. The ranch we stayed at was just miles from the festival grounds. We left heading away from the festival to the airport and on the way saw a line that makes your heart drop and eyes fall out. Over 20 miles of stand still traffic ! A few people shouted "your going the wrong way" to really help the obvious sink in. After picking our friends up at the airport and meeting our final two friends we headed back towards the festival. When we got back to where we thought the line would be we saw a police officer redirecting traffic. Our new route was 2 hours long leading us through national forest on a one way road. The traffic started standing still in the middle of the woods around 5 pm. The line would move a few cars forward every hour or so. At this rate we thought we would never get in. Night fell and we decided to walk up ahead to see if we could find anything out. We came to an intersection where the two lines of traffic merged. And up ahead as far as you could see was a winding snake of red tail lights. We weren't getting in for a LONG TIME. We walked back to the truck and let everyone know what we saw. In the late hours of the night people were falling asleep in their vehicles. Sometimes other people would jump out of their cars and knock on the windows of the people a sleep. Other times they would just get passed and fall back further in line. At one point a cop was driving up and down the line with a mega phone telling people to wake up. After twelves hours of being in the line we finally made it into the festival. Our camp was set up right as the sun rose.
For the most part I will let the video speak for the Festival. There was so much to take part in that it became overwhelming at times. Looking at the schedule was almost impossible. It was best to just go with the flow and not have too many expectations. In my opinion the main two challenges we ran into were:
- Being over a mile from the entrance gate because of overflow camping.
- THE DUST
The eclipse was one of the most amazing moments of my life. And to experience it with that many people enriched the experience even more. The feeling was almost unexplainable. It sent my emotions all over the place
Seven days is the longest festival I've ever experienced but it still flew by so fast!
We left the festival on the seventh day in the morning with no delays getting off the property. We were a bit slow and sloppy packing everything up due to no sleep on the final night. Thankgoodness for Kyler's coffee! On our way leaving the festival we saw multiple cars accidents. The tiredness we all felt gave us an idea of how someone could have wrecked leaving. The first town we reached we stopped at a diner and got lunch. We were all very much looking forward to our Air BnB after the festival so we could clean up and recoup.
Coming up on Chapter Three - The ride back to Missouri and all the awesome nature we got to explore!