Kedrick: 10 - Blogaroo 2025

Hey everyone!!! Long time no see. I had a good post planned today detailing by experience and the music I saw at Bonnaroo 2025. For those of you who have not yet heard, the festival was cancelled yesterday (Friday, June 13th) at 7:36 PM central time due to weather, primarily flooding. This post is therefore dedicated to the frontline Bonnaroovians who are either still there or are trying to make their way home, however far that is.

Ready for Roo!

I’ll start with the original plan. My buddy Danny and I bought Friday single day passes and were going to see Foster the People, Goose, Tyler the Creator, Glass Animals, Tipper, and likely other assorted artists. Insanely stacked lineup for one day! Since we’re only about 3 hour drive away from the festival, we planned on driving over Friday afternoon, enjoying the festivities, and then sleeping in my car either in the day parking lot or finding a truck stop to park at. We’d sleep a couple hours and then be on our way back home. The setup was actually pretty cool.

Thanks for the idea Lizzie :)

Now here’s what actually happened. As I mentioned, the drive from Atlanta to Roo is just about 3 hours, so we left around 1:30 Eastern. After two quick stops, one at Walmart to pick up an impulse idea (two disposable cameras), and one at Chick-fil-A for a delicious lunch, we were off to the festival. For some reason, even though I’ve been to the festival twice before, neither Danny or I considered the fact that it’s in the central time zone. Free hour though, nice. Since we’re both males in our late 20s, we obviously just drove straight through without stopping. Throughout the drive to Tennessee, we got a couple text updates from Bonnaroo that the music was delayed and gates would be closed for a few hours. Not a big deal! It would blow over and be open by the time we got there (or shortly afterwards). 

We arrived at the box office at 4:30 central, which is at a local high school. I thought it was a cool setup. I picked up our day parking pass and we drove towards the festival gates. Bonnaroo social media hadn’t provided an update in over an hour, so we were hopeful that the gates had opened up. As we neared the road that leads to the gate, traffic started to build up. As a religious believer in the “zipper” method, I hopped in the lane that was moving with the intent to merge later. We got to the road and were informed by a cop that the gates were closed. Danny thought he was doing a bit at first, like a “haha I hate my job turn around we're closed” type deal, but I suspected he was serious. We got to the road we need to turn onto and BAM, traffic cones! Darn. We kept going and passed the Circle K that serves as the last stop before the festival. Absolute f****** madhouse. Cars were for some reason bumper to bumper in the parking lot, I’m talking maybe 40 cars in there. No getting in or out. Why??? We kept driving a couple hundred yards further and parked on the shoulder of the road as many other people were doing. I did a U-turn as well which gave us a great view of the disastrous situation that was happening. Vibes at this point were still pretty darn high.

I'm on the edge of life, and the view is gorgeous

Bonnaroo provided an update at around 5PM central. Not a good one - they said the gates and centeroo (where the music is) would be closed for another few hours. OK. Not optimal but not terrible. Bonnaroo starts pretty late since it’s extremely hot during the day (as you can imagine), so the sets we really wanted to see didn’t start until 9:30. Pretty good amount of time to work with!! 

At about 5:30, it wasn’t raining so we got out of the car, cracked a couple beers, and walked ahead to a gas station (across from the Circle K, nowhere near as busy) to talk to people and kill time. We were over there for around 45 minutes until it started raining again. We headed back to the car and Danny started FaceTiming some of his friends to fill them in on the situation. This was an excellent way to pass time! 

Patiently waiting

By 6:45, vibes were still reasonably high. It stopped raining and the sun was even peaking through the clouds so we got out of the car again. I went to pee and took the last photo I have before the Big News. 

Good spot to pee

While walking back, I saw the truck in front of us left and was replaced with an SUV full of people that immediately got out. It looked like they were getting ready to go into the festival, so we asked them what was up. They informed us that they had friends in a car that made it pretty close to the gate, so they were going to walk over there. One of the guys (maybe the driver) was a little concerned they might get towed so he gave me his number in case anything started happening, then they all went towards the gate. We would not see them again.

Around 7, it started raining again. This was the famed “last band” before it would be dry the remainder of the night. We got back in the car. I started another session of refreshing new posts on r/Bonnaroo. The last official update was at 5, so we were due for an update very soon. Still enough time to get in and see the acts we really care about. Tyler didn’t go on until 11!

By 7:30, it really set in that this cancellation of Friday’s acts was possible if not probable. I’m sure the day parking lot was completely underwater and with the length of this delay, cars were very built up around the area and the line to get into day parking was sure to be an absolute mess. Still a shred of hope though!

7:36 PM central time. Danny gets a twitter post notification from Bonnaroo. He clicks and pauses for a split second before uttering one word:

“Drive.”

I refreshed instagram and read the first 3 words of the post before throwing the car into drive and peeling out of our spot. “Read the whole post to me but we gotta get out of here”, I said. We had to take a left through gridlocked traffic to get onto I-24 the correct way, so I elected to not do that and just hop on the interstate the wrong way and turn around at a different exit. Amazing call. We turned around and drove past the two festival exits. The shoulder of the interstate was lined with people waiting to get in. Some very dystopian stuff.

We got out extremely easily and then were able to really understand and take in the weight of what just happened. They didn’t cancel just Friday, they cancelled the entire remainder of the festival. It was about to be an absolute nightmare for people to get out even if their cars weren’t stuck in mud. Danny immediately called his fiancee and let her know what happened, then we called my beautiful wife Lizzie and let her know as well. Pretty much everybody, us very much included, was in disbelief. The first half of our 3 hour drive home was filled with calling people and telling them what happened, which was a very good way to pass time. We talked to a couple of Danny’s friends and then we talked to a fellow companion, Quentin. The drive went by extremely fast since we had just lived through a historic event and got out basically unscathed.

We arrived back in Atlanta at 11:30 eastern. I dropped Danny off and then got a Taco Bell cravings box. Overall, I had a great time at Bonnaroo. Can't wait to go back.

TB!