Tree Town Festival…

Last time, I mentioned that I’d bought tickets for the Tree Town Music Festival, and that I was disappointed that I’d paid $525 for the RV parking space I’d chosen. The map was slick and professionally done, except they manipulated it in  such a way it seemed like I was just steps from the front gate for the venue. They kind of took liberties with the drawing of their RV parking areas. Turned out that I was like 1/4 mile from the venues main (and only entrance) gate. Which was not in the same location as the map showed it.

But that wasn’t the only disappointment. This festival is in the middle of the country and the excessive nationalism was on full display, which included a truckload of good ‘ol boys standing up in the bed of their pickup truck cruising around the parking grounds, swilling their Bud light beer, waving their oversized southern surrender flags, the bars and stars. In addition the overt religion on display was rather off putting too, but that was nearly all by the stage announcers and many of the acts. The jumbo trons meanwhile, kept up displaying support for war and guns nearly non-stop between promoting up coming acts and local businesses. Several concert goers had the surrender hats or shirts on. I saw ONE person of color at this concert, a black guy who was working on one of the big generators. That’s not exactly the kind of ‘inclusion’ I like to see at concerts.

But I’d chosen to buy the ticket and be here so tried to make the most of it. After leaving the Winnebago customer service park, it’s a 1 mile drive to the entrance gate of the venue. I had planned on waiting a day before coming over but there was already a line of RVs entering the grounds when I drove over to check it out in the car, so I went back to the Winnie lot, hurriedly packed up, attached the car to the RV and headed over to the entrance to get in the RV que.

Two hours earlier when I’d been here in the car scoping it out, there was only one of these lines filled up with RVs. Now there’s 3 of them. And the lines are moving, though slowly. All three of these lanes get necked down into one lane. There’s a forth lane being filled up too as more RVs showed up. This area is just behind Heritage Park. One of those parks where they’ve bought and moved entire houses here to display how life use to be in these parts. I wanted to visit but it never opened the week I was in the area. Seems they missed a golden opportunity with all the people nearby as it’s a paid style museum. I would have visited for sure.

The wait was long enough that my engine was off most of the wait, and some folks got out and wandered around, beers in hand. A couple drunk guys spent 20 minutes just in front of me trying to talk up a couple gurls in their car. They resisted so the guys eventually wandered off.

After about an hour, finally got to the main gate for RVs, verified my ticket, and headed where they pointed to my space. Was a bit confused and took me a bit to find it as it was much further away from what I could see as the venue. Way off in the distance, I thought those colorful flags must be the entrance to the venue. Nope. Entrance is way over towards the left side. This is a telephoto shot and you can make out the stage, that big black thing peeking over the RV on the left.Well, I got settled in. There’s power and water, no sewer, but a few dump sites here on the property. Satellite worked fine. But no Wifi from the Winnebago buildings a half mile north. The Winnebago Visitors Center is that half mile plus it’s across the main road another 1/4 mile.

In fact this area is all Winnebago property and the installed facilities; roads, power, water, dump sites, meeting buildings, etc. for RVs are for their yearly Winnebago Owners Rally. Must be quite the big event. I think they could get 1,000 RVs on this property easily. But I was parked nearly as far as you can get from the main Winnie building in this section of their holdings, and even further away from the Visitors Center, which means no free wifi from their buildings. They didn’t turn it off, because my high-gain antenna picked it up, but only one bar, too weak to use. And disappeared after all those RVs got between me and the transmitter.You can’t tell in the above picture, but there’s a Motel 8 over near the highway, passed those 3 more RV rows behind my RV, and they have their unsecured Wifi running. I could see the building from the bedroom window on the passenger side of the RV so put my high gain antenna back there. Got a pretty good signal that way and was able to use their Wifi the entire 4 days I was here. My high gain antenna helped with that, most people with their Androids or Laptop computers with built in antennas might see the SSID, but it would be too weak for them to use. For me, I could use it like I was sitting in their lobby.

And looking towards the venue. See that red/yellow striped sign? I thought that was the gate. Note how healthy the grass is. The red building is the horse barn. The heritage museum is passed that fence on the right.

As I set up, power and water connected, got the jacks lowered and the RV leveled, extended the satellite dish, and finally, extended the front slide, then walked back into the bedroom to extend the bedrooms slide and I see sunlight around the bottom of the slide. WTH? I’d just paid hundreds for that to be repaired, and now it’s still doing something wrong. Hmmm, I was thinking that maybe when I left Winnebago’s visitor center that since I was in a hurry, maybe I didn’t close it all the way? Well, I’ll deal with that later.

A couple hours after I settled in, headed over to the venue for a look around. This is early in the day with no headliners scheduled to play, plus the first act doesn’t come on until 8 pm, so there’s not too many people wandering around inside. Just workers. But they allow you in to look around. My RV is so far from the venue, that I had ridden my bike down to the gate. I was really pissed at this point, because I’d tried to get a reasonable idea of how far I’d be from the main gate before I bought my parking space because I couldn’t really tell from their crappy online venue map. Even emailed them pointing out my concerns with the maps discrepancies and mentioning I didn’t want to walk too far because of my bad hips and knees and that I’d have a person in a wheel chair with me. One of their people called me shortly after my email was sent telling me it wasn’t an issue because my space would be right on the main path to the venue’s main gate and super close so there’d be no problem walking. And I’d better buy fast before the spaces in the Big Rig area were all gone! Lies!

Those bastards are just so fuk’in greedy that it matters little to them about the lies they tell or the inconvenience they cause. How callous of the official that called me. Wasn’t until I got here and saw it was more than 1/4 mile walk, on gravel roads, that I realized why he called me instead of answering my email with an email…so there’d be no paper evidence of his dishonesty. I emailed the Tree Town festival the next day with a complaint. They never answered.

As I mentioned, the gate was so far away, I rode my bike there. It definitely wasn’t the straight shot the venue map showed, had to navigate. What’s worse is that there are 10’s or 100’s of RV spaces even closer then my space is. And they were all less expensive as I recall, like $100 less. And many of them remained empty the entire concert.

The gate was being casually manned and monitored as there’s so few people trying to enter. Plus it was still early in the day.  Just inside are the vendors tents, they were busy getting all set up. I enjoyed watching them get ready.

And a look back at the RV parking area through the fence.  My RV is parked past the 2nd building shown here, to the right of it. And a telephoto from the entrance area over to the stage. Showing the back of some more vendors tents. Food and drink. T-shirts, that sort of thing.All those trailers attest to the size of this festival. After getting past the vendors tents, here’s the stage and the seating area where everyone will bring their folding camping chairs. Quite the area. Huge. Look at those big jumbo trons on either side of the stage. Those big white tents are sponsor’s tents. Even with all I paid, I don’t get to go inside those, however, I did schmooze my way into the Winnebago tent when I told the greeter that I’d just paid $1700 for repairs at the repair center. He let me stay and sit at a comfy table with a good view, but I didn’t get any free drinks or food.Some of the talent getting things set up with the roadies.

After that visit I had a good idea of what I’d do later at near 8 pm when I came over for the concert. What to bring, what to wear, that sort of thing.

Here’s a google earth map of the venue with Motel 8 labeled, along with some of the Winnebago buildings. Ariel view of the festival venue… Due east of the Motel 8 is where my RV would have been parked, just a couple rows past that 90 degree curve in the road, so maybe 150 feet from that curve. The stage would have been right inside that whiteish blotch that looks sort of like a pan with a long handle, it’s like NE from the motel.

Show didn’t start until 8pm so after just messing around all day, had my dinner, watched some TV and then headed down again with my folding chair. It was a bitch trying to carry that on my bike and not tumble head first to the ground. And as I entered the gate, they looked at my computer printed ticket, scanned it and waved me though. When you leave, even for just a minute, if you don’t get a hand stamp, you can’t get back in that same day as your ticket has already been scanned in and used for your earlier entrance. That’s so people can’t pass their ticket back to their friend.

And this I believe is either the Vic Ferrari or  Eddie Money band. Pretty good. Eddie’s band performed Thursday night starting at 9:30 pm. I watched and listened to most of that performance. Next day, Friday, was more of the same. No headliner that I recognized the name of but I did go by and listen a couple times from the outside of the fence. Mostly just hang around the RV, took several bike rides looking around, dragged my chair and bag of goodies down there when it seemed right, and then tried not to be too bored since mostly it’s just waiting for acts to appear. Some of the acts aren’t too well known. But there was a surprise or two by a talented artist.

Here’s were I was sitting the first night. No act on the stage yet, the jumbo trons are showing an ad for the Saturday night act.

And this is how ominous the clouds were looking as they gathered. Looking back towards where the RVs are parked. Got a bit dicey later in the evening when those huge black ominous clouds formed over in the west and started heading right for us. Remember I am over 1/4 mile from my RV without an umbrella, with my chair and bike. So I left early. It was too windy to ride the bike and carry the chair so had to walk. Got home after a fierce wind picked up but the rain was light.

Saturday the show started at 3 pm featuring Jesse Becker. She has a great voice and lots of talent but her songs are all rather familiar. Nothing too unique. I watched a couple acts and then those big black clouds formed again. And they looked even more ominous then before. I left after Carly Pierce (she’s good!) but before Chris Lanes’ act. The final act was Kieth Urban and I’d learned that most of his songs are about religion anyway and I didn’t want to be pelted by that or by rain, so I headed home before the storm hit, but the wind had already picked up. You could really tell it was heading our way too. Before I left the concert, saw lots of heads swiveling around checking it out. Got home around 6:30 just before the worse of the rain, thunder, and lightening hit and boy, it was so fierce I was very happy I skipped the latter half of the show. I was too far away to see if the wind did any damage but before I left the venue there was some rain and wind, I left during one short period where it let up. The wind at one time had picked up, big sun screens were dropped for safety after one of them broke it’s tie downs, the cameramen in the tower were getting a bit worried, with awnings pelting their backsides, parts of tents were ripping off and blowing away, etc.. It sort of looked like the prelude to a tornado. I’m not sure if Urban finished his act or even took the stage.

And finally, Sunday’s show featured both the Charlie Daniel’s Band and Alabama. Both groups I’ve admired their music for a long time. Luckily the weather was fine all day and into the night. Charlie didn’t start until 8pm and Alabama didn’t start until 10pm. So I stayed home and missed the earlier acts…names I didn’t recognize anyway.

Unfortunately Charlie Daniels felt the need to spout all sorts of nationalistic BS and support for #45 that wasn’t the least bit necessary to his act. He’s just a performer and doesn’t have any special knowledge of this or that bit of politics or about religion and I’d have preferred he shut up about it and just sang his songs. That’s what I’d paid for, not to be lectured by a singer.

After he finished and left the stage, Alabama washed away the disgust I had for the previous act with reprising their string of hits from over the last 25 years. Good music, good lyrics, and no nationalistic preaching. Good for them and their restraint.

And that was that. The end of a week in Forest City where it seems I’d been taken to the cleaners by both the Winnebago service crew (more on this in later postings), and by the Tree Town organizers.

Thanks for reading, sorry I got a bit negative about things as my nature is happy-go-lucky, but sometimes, grrrrrr, just gotta vent.