US, solar eclipse and festival experience!!!

lavidaesunviaje (51)in #travel • 7 years ago

Today i'm gonna tell my first visit to the US, full solar eclipse and big festival experience...

The adventure starts!!!

After traveling alone all latin america finally i got my ticket to the US with my beloved soulmate... not planning to much just going to this interesting Solar Eclipse Festival...

Our first impression landing in SF was not nice... so many homeless people, wheelchairs, crazy people on the streets... big decadence impresion... we stayed just one night at an expensive dirty hostel... never before payed 35U$ for a dorm bed in such a shithole... i guess the US is not the land of hostels...

Second thing we realized pretty soon was that is also not a land for backpacking, hitchhiking or traveling in public transportation... it almost doesn't exist... so...

Lucky for us we heard a couple talking about redwoods and those two words ware in my mind for a while... we needed t travel north to get to the festival site close to Bend, Oregon... Half way out of SF we realize they are going south, to the sequoia national park, also red woods but not the one we thought...

We are improvising while traveling so, nothing is too bad and we just decided to flow with them to yosemite and then see how we can do it to the festival... we had a deadline to be there or lose our money...

Yosemite Park:

So, after a few days enjoying the amazing nature in yosemite we toke what would be the only public transportation we used in 3 months in the US, from yosemite to La Merced... The plan was to rent a car there for a month for around 1000 U$...
Not so quick guys... the insurance costs a lot of money if you're not over 25... so a month would cost you 2000U$... F... me!!! im 39 but i dont have a f...ing drivers license and my girl is 24!!! To hell with our plan...
Plan B: rent for 24 hours, Daniela drives 600 miles to the festival, we leave our stuff there, go back to bend, return the car and hitch hike back to the festival... Well... sounds nice but... after 16 hours driving, sleeping 2 in a gas station parking getting to the festival and waiting there about an hour we had no time to wait anymore without paying an extra day rental we drove back to bend got a discount for extra day and got back to festival... shit man... so tired...

Next day left our stuff, returned the car in bend and easily got a ride back!!!... not easy but finally we are there...

The Festival!!!

We signed in as volunteers, 6 days 6 hours a day in exchange for entrance, spot for tent and food...
The first three nights we slept on the volunteer camp in our tent on a terrible flor full of roots and rocks

but we were so awesome workers that made friends with some staff members and moved to the crew camp site... nice shade, better land, hot showers and safer environment...
Before the actual festival started we saw this huge empty spaces, stages, art, shops, food area... everything so big and different to anything we saw before... so nice to have a complete new experience...

We started doing plumbing, fencing, and recycling...

After the 6th day we were free but as i said, we were so good workers that we got payed jobs instantly... We did 5 or 6 days cleaning toilets and finally we got our spots with the amazing green team(garbage and recycling)

So, festival starting day is here, people starts coming, car line on the road reached 15 hours wait... all that huge area gets packed with rv's cars, tents and other weird things... lights turn on, music starts... festival on!!!

We don't have this kind of thing in south america... this is huge!!! amazing, i almost can't blinc... So many customers, so many lights, so many different activities... We watch everything while working... dust everywhere too... but nobody cares...

I'm not really into electronic music, but man... this shit attracts so many people, some aliens maybe here too...
So, almost 4 weeks go by, we did pre festival, festival and after festival... green team did a great job and i'm so happy to see those mountains of garbage being collected, sorted and recycled...

I think the best thing was to work with green team... for sure i wanna repeat that experience...
by the way, we made enough money to buy a van, fix it and survive in the US for another 2 months...

The Eclipse!!!

The day before the festival ended it was the eclipse day... big expectations in everyone!!!
Man, i can't describe it with another word than MAGIC!!!! It takes more than an hour for the moon to completely block the sun and you can't look straight at it until the full eclipse is set without special glasses... but there is one and a half minutes when it's night again, you can see stars and the temperature drops what i guess was around 8°...
It's such a strange feeling to look at that perfect black circle surrounded by white light... im sure im going on 2020 to chile to see the next one there...