After eventually acquiring a tent from Target, we left San Francisco and headed to the festival. We managed to catch a lift with someone we met on Craigslist who was also going to the festival, so we didn’t have to worry about finding our way there (if we did, we would have struggled a lot – hiring a car was going to cost almost $1000, and public transport for a journey that long is practically non-existent).
The festival site is pretty much exactly half way between San Francisco and LA, in a small town called Bradley, so it broke up our journey between the two cities nicely. It took about 4 hours to drive to the festival, stopping on the way for my second In-N-Out burger of the week (equally as delicious as the first). During the drive, we watched the scenery get more and more arid, as we moved from Northern California into the drier climate of Central California. The festival itself is held next to a dried up lake bed and when we got to the site it felt like a completely different world to where we had been a few hours before – gone were the foggy skies and steep hills of San Francisco, replaced instead with flat, dry lands that stretched for miles until they met the bright blue sky.
As well as the stark difference in scenery, I was struck by how amazing everything looked. All of the stages had their own distinct theme, but they were all tied together through their use of bright, breezy fabrics. Lightning in a Bottle is run by the DoLab, the same people who run Coachella, so there was definitely a similar vibe in the design. What I loved most about the festival though was the level of effort that had clearly gone into creating the staging and scenery across the entire site, from the main stage right down to a tiny mock-speakeasy in the woods.
The festival also commissioned a lot of artists to come and create pieces for the site, both beforehand and during the festival itself. Works such as the four teapots above (that you could actually climb in and sit inside if you dared) were a big draw, as was the room made entirely of tarot card-themed doors. Just in front of the Woogie stage, there was a penned-in section of grass where artists set up their canvases and got to work painting, whilst visitors milled around them.
As you might expect, being in a desert, the festival was achingly hot for most of the day. From around 8am, the sun would shine on our tent so brightly that we had to open it up completely just so we could breathe. Some people were smart enough to bring marquees to cover their tents with so they had more shade, but we were trying to pack lightly and didn’t think of it (next time!). From then on, it would just get hotter and hotter, until by midday I was struggling to walk at more than a crawl, and all I could think about was where the next patch of shade was. (As you may be able to tell, I don’t cope particularly well in extreme heat – I can get up to around 23 or 24 Celsius absolutely fine, but much more than that and I start to flag). Even though it was probably no more than 30 degrees at any point, the sun was unrelenting and there wasn’t much shade except for the purpose-built shade shelters, so needless to say I was incredibly thankful for the multiple water pumps on site.
By the time it got dark, however, the temperature dropped almost instantaneously to jumper-and-jeans temperatures. I much preferred this, as I could walk around the site without needing to stop and cool off every few minutes, plus dancing to the bands kept me pretty warm.
This was the first festival I’d ever been to where the musical line-up wasn’t the main reason for me wanting to go. Although I had heard of a few people on the bill, most of them were completely alien to me. This ended up being a really good thing, as it meant that we could wander around the festival, stopping to listen if we heard an artist we liked, but not rushing to get anywhere. I always find that mad rush really stressful when someone you like is playing on the other side of the festival in like, two minutes, and it was really nice to not have that at Lightning in a Bottle (also I don’t think I could actually have rushed anywhere in that heat).
One of the first artists we saw (and one of the few I had heard of) was Bakermat on the on the Woogie stage (above). This was the smallest of the three main stages, and probably consistently the least busy – I think probably due to the fact that it was further away from the main campsite than the other two stages, which were also reasonably close to each other. It was also my personal favourite, visually – the DJ booth was in a treehouse that lit up, the trees were covered in swathes of fabric, and water sprayed out over the crowd during the day to cool everyone down.
Bakermat himself was really good – he played his most popular songs, including this one, mixed with remixes of songs by other artists, which went down really well with the crowd. Also, having looked him up since I got back, I am really saddened by the fact that he is only a year older than me – it seems to be a trend for DJs to be insanely young and successful.
Anyway, aside from Bakermat, we also saw some amazing acts, including Flume, who closed the main stage on Saturday night. The picture above shows how much fun we were having whilst watching Flume (and I am sitting someone on my shoulders for the first time in my life). We also saw AlunaGeorge, who I have known about for a couple of years, since I saw them at Latitude, and were as good as I remembered.
However, I would say that the music is only half of the festival, at most. A lot of emphasis is placed on meditation and yoga, and many of the tents and stages around the site are dedicated solely to self-improvement. We went to a few classes, some of which were physically challenging, and some of which were a bit too much for me, mentally. The one class that I will remember, probably until my dying day, was like this scene from Peepshow. Sadly, no one in America understood this reference, but back home people know what I mean.
Overall, I adored Lightning in a Bottle, despite the heat. I loved the classes, the music and how friendly everyone was all the time. Most of all though, I loved how the creators of the festival worked so hard to create an entire world through design – everything about the festival was so well thought out and looked so cohesive and wonderful. Going to Lightning in a Bottle for the weekend transports you to a different world, where you can forget all your worries, make new friends and improve yourself, and if you ever find yourself in central California at the end of May, I highly recommend going.
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