I owe you a plethora of apologies for not keeping you updated on the goings-on of yours truly, April, it would suffice to say, as been a rather busy month. I've got lots to tell you, but this entry will be reserved for telling the tale of Coachella 2010. I'll update you about the rest in my next post, which likely turn out to be a bulleted list lacking any semblance of literary worth. Just you wait and see...
Onward!
As my last post informed you our trip to the Coachella Music & Arts Festival was dual-purpose... checking out some sweet live music and distributing 10,000 free condoms to the dirty, sweaty, drunken masses to that they'd keep their herpes to themselves. I'd like to report that we were successful in those endeavors... as well as many more.
It all began with Gail and I bailing on our infectious disease lab by late morning Thursday so that Megha could pick us up in a timely fashion and our journey to southern California could commence. Of course, we couldn't just drive right to Indio, CA (the site of Coachella), first we had to stop at Megha's parent's house in Malibu to swap her Mini Cooper for their minivan, as well as pick up the two giant boxes filled with condoms that they so graciously allowed to be shipped to their home. After that we'd be picking up Megha's friend Ron (and the object of my new bromance) at LAX, stopping in Pasadena, and finally heading east to Indio. Having left Berkeley at roughly noon, we arrived at the entrance to Coachella at 2am. This what we found...
That would be the 2-hour wait we found. A field full of cars being searched by overtired Marine volunteers and Coachella staff. We made the most of it by hiding our hard liquor and other unmentionables in the compartment that the minivan seat folds into under the floor and passing out condoms to all the people waiting in or on their cars. We may have also had a few beers. By 5am we had been searched, checked in, and found our campsite. We had our tents pitched by dawn and proceeded to get oh... about 1.5 hours of sleep. We awoke to this...
Beautiful sight, no? Well it was hot. Coachella is essentially the desert. I've yet to mention that in addition to the four of us in Megha's ride, we met the other half of our crew right before entering the festival (Divya, Scott, Baran, and Mary). So after cooling off with some morning High Lifes and getting our bleary-eyed selves together we embarked on the trek across the festival grounds to the entrance to the concert area. Though it took an inhuman amount of stamina on hardly any sleep, we spent from roughly 2pm until 1am checking out the following lineup.
- Deer Tick; Rhode Island natives who gave Divya and I a shout-out for yelling about Providence. They rocked harder than I expected, one of the best acts I saw all weekend.
- The Avett Brothers; a fantastic follow-up to Deer Tick.
- She & Him; god I want to slap Zoe Daschanel. As Robbie put, she's obnoxiously adorable.
- Passion Pit; who played a stellar set right at sunset. Very awesome.
- Vampire Weekend; sounded great, but their show wasn't anything out of the ordinary.
- Jay-Z; Friday's headliner who did not disappoint. Even dragged Beyonce out for a final track, but left a lot of people disappointed since the buzz for the two weeks prior was that Dre would be making an appearance during his show. At this point in the night my memories are clouded and it all seemed surreal.
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