California: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

When planning the trip to the San Francisco bay area I knew I had to be there for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival.  Hardly Strictly takes over the Golden Gate park for three days, and has been getting bigger and more famous every year. Remarkably, the entire festival is free to the public!  A very nice person (about whom I know next to nothing) named Warren Hellman sponsors the entire thing, funding musicians, security, cleanup crews, everything.  All that the rest of San Francisco has to do is pack blankets and picnic lunches and show up.  And they show up in droves!  This year there were six stages, and an estimated 600,000  people were there over October 1, 2, and 3.  This year's musicians included Jerry Douglas, Ralph Stanley, Gillian Welch, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Doc Watson, Emmylou Harris, and the Avett Brothers, just to name a few.  If you're not a fan of bluegrass those names might not mean a lot, but trust me, for those of us who like banjos and mandolins it was quite a line-up. 

This first picture gives you an idea of the size of the crowd - and remember, this is just one of six stages! 

Here's me with my brother Chuck.  Chuck got up at dawn both Saturday and Sunday to lay out a blanket near one of the stages so that the rest of us would have a spot to sit when we came by a few hours later. 

 The festival ends before sunset, but we still hadn't had enough bluegrass, so we went back to Chuck's house, lit a fire in his back yard (yes, in a little red wagon) and sat around playing more music. 

And this last picture is of me with Erin and Kate, just about to hear the Indigo Girls on Sunday.  We're happy with the music AND with the big back of kettle corn that we're about to start eating.  I ate kettle corn for the rest of the week...

Unfortunately, I don't have any good pictures of one of the more entertaining parts of Hardly Strictly - our fellow fans.  This was three days of fantastic people watching, and a bit of a shock to my system after the solitude of Utah and Nevada.  There were lots of people with very original dancing styles and some pretty creative outfits.

Sunday afternoon everything ended and everyone went home.  It was a great introduction to the city and a chance for me to catch up with my friends and meet Chuck's crowd.  And it was the first time I pulled out the warmer clothes.  I've been running away from Fall and Winter, but it looks like it might be starting to catch up with me.