Michfest Part 2 (Rolling In & Setting Up)

Day 2 (8/3) Monday
When we work up in the morning it was raining. I prayed that it wouldn’t be raining when we got to the land because I had no desire to put up my tent in the rain. Usually I wouldn’t even think about it because the festival provides tents for artists, but this year I decided to purchase my own tent because Bombshell was coming with me and I wanted us to have enough space. As an artist you are allowed on guest for free, but the festival will not provide a tent for them. With that in mind Bombshell and I would have to share space and the two-person tent the festival would have provided would not have been big enough for us. So I made the tent investment.

Now, back to the morning at the hotel. We all came down and ate the free breakfast. We got ourselves together and made one more civilization stop at Target just to make sure we had all that we needed. I had to purchase another set of sheets for the air mattress and a few other choice things. Then we left Target and headed for the festival.

The ride was a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Bombshell drove us onto the grounds and what a site to see. Since this was the first time we drove (you might remember my dreaded Chicago airport blogs of last fest) we had never seen the line to get in the festival. When driving in to Michfest, the last place to get phone signal is Hart, MI. When you get there the festival asked us to call the office so they can inform the gate of our arrival and we won’t have to wait in the festie line (that’s the line of folks who are regular festival goers not performers or workers).

There is a 3-mile stretch of road that leads to the gate. We turned off a paved road to this dirt road and let me tell you there were almost three miles of cars waiting for the gate to open. It was amazing. People were just posted up by their cars, meeting and greeting each other, playing instruments and eating. Basically just chillin’. It was just incredible. They had either been there for a while or knew they would be, but everyone was cool. I saw a cool lady in pink who would later turn out to be my girl Christine Love and then another woman in a full on Wonder Woman costume. I really need one of those in my life. We rode by all of these folks and right up to the gate where they waved us in and we parked. It was the VIP treatment, woods style.

We unpacked the van and repacked the vans that would take us to the artist/worker area where we would be camping. When we got there everything was taken off the vans for us. That’s one thing about this festival. You don’t really have to life a finger for your things. They have folks specifically designated to help the artists with their items. All of our things were unloaded off the vans and brought into an area called Central Heating. That is basically the artist nerve center/night show green room. In Central Heating they know when people are coming in and going out, how they are traveling and who they are traveling with. It’s a seamless operation. Honestly this ship is so tight it’s amazing. I’m so glad that this is one of my first festival experiences of this size so I know how things should really go and how you should be treated as an artist.

When we got all of our things out of the van we located out tent. Lee Free (Hanifah’s drummer) and Kelly dropped it off earlier. We put everything on a cart and two workers were assigned to help Bombshell and I put up our condo tent. I call it a condo tent because it was really big and it had a screen porch.

We wheeled our stuff down to an area that I later dubbed the suburbs because it was kind of far from everyone else’s tent area, but very cool still. It took us a bit to put the tent up, but we chose not to read the instructions because they were a bit like IKEA and any one who has bought something from IKEA knows what I’m talking about. After a bit of back and forth we got the thing up and it was great. We could fit our air mattresses and the rest of our things with no trouble. I hung a clothesline between two trees across the way so that I had a place to hang my towels and such. We were home; at least for the week. Tiffany and Lucianna were in our area, but they hadn’t arrived yet. Tiff would be there on Tuesday and Luci on Thursday.


[This is my condo tent in the wood. Tiffany next door]

Monday was pretty chill. After we got set up and ate I walked around the land a bit. All in all the land is 650 acres. I went and said hello to folks at the Womyn of Color Tent (Cassandra in particular) and just took it all in. Monday night was not so exciting, but it was one of the best nights of sleep I had. I was warm that night so no sleeping in layers. There would not be much more of that. The following nights were very cold.

One day down and many to go. Well at least that’s what it feels like when you get there, but then the days just fly. Sadly they just fly by.