Hopefully my rant helps someone hahaha.Īs a season ticket holder I decided to have my son's 9th birthday there. But the logistics of getting there I'd give 2 or 3 stars and camping I'd give 0 stars to. I'd give the festival 4 or 5 stars by itself. I'll come again, but I'll just come Friday and Saturday and grab a hotel Friday night and have a late night drive home Saturday. You can also park at PNC field and grab a shuttle from there, which isn't so bad, but the whole shuttle situation is handled by an independent contractor and can be a bit of a fiasco. They'll run shuttles to the local hotels. I'd pick the two best days to go (likely Friday and Saturday) and get a hotel nearby. They have actual police walking around the main grounds but I didn't see any near any of the actual stages and they pretty much let you do your thing as long as you're not causing a ruckus. Bag check is minimal, just don't have your contraband right on top. The pavilion is just a big tarp tent, so I suspect it acts sort of as a drum skin. You'd think if they're booking big names and selling the place out they could get an acoustics engineer in there to reduce the echos as much as possible. But there are some weird echos going on, both under the tarp and in the lawn, you might not notice them if you're not paying attention but I'm sort of a snob about these things. The pavilion (which is the Peach Stage) is pretty cool. I don't really find this a big deal but a bunch of festival goers seemed to have issues with this situation. So when you grab a $12 beer and walk from the mushroom stage (which is owned by Montage Mountain) you have to either finish or dump it on your way to the Peach Stage (which is owned by Live Nation). Another thing they fail to mention is that the festival actually spans 2 venues, they are attached but operate separate liquor licenses. Also if it rains be prepared for the mountain to become a mud bog slip-n-slide type thing that you have to deal with drunk, possibly inebriated in other ways, and tired at 2am after the music ends. And of course festival campers are not a particularly quiet group of people in the first place. Which is great until its 12:30am and you just want some damn sleep. Another thing that wasn't my favorite about camping is that you're close enough to the mushroom stage that you can heat it from camp. Try to camp near the vendors, then you have resources close, water, "bathrooms" (port-a-jons), the festival enterance, and of course the previously mentioned vendors. I alternatively recommend getting there really early to get a good camp site. And after several days you definitely don't want to be hiking up the mountain to leave. If you do camp I recommend hiking up with your stuff because then on the day you leave you just have to go down. What was a big deal was lugging all my gear up a freaking mountain in order to find some "level-ish" ground to set up on. I ended up in the woods on a bed of rocks (with an air mattress the ricks were really no big deal). I got there around 4pm on Thursday and there were no good spots left at all. So level ground is not a thing that exists. Once you get off your on your own to find a spot to post up. They bus you in to the mountain from a remote lot where you can load your gear into a trailer (pretty much the size to fit a car on) being pulled by a diesel pickup and they will drive you around the camping area. To get into a few more con's for a min.: The camping situation is terrible. The lineup for 2016 was/is pretty good as well, lots of good music to see. The Mushroom stage is in direct sunlight with no shade in sight. The pavilion itself is pretty neat, especially if you can get in it and get some shade. There are 2 waterslides, a wave pool (which is right next to "The Mushroom Stage"), the shortest lazy river I've ever seen and a kiddie pool sort of thing. Also it's kind of a poor excuse for a water park in the first place. All the water is visibly brownish in color. Well if you're going in that water you have more balls than I do. And if your rebuttle is "well there's a water park to help in cooling off" after a day or 2 of hippies camping out using the water park as their primary means of bathing. It's kind of silly to have a music festival at this time of August as its incredibly hot, and unless you're actually under the pavilion shade is sparse.
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