The Strawberry Park Bluegrass Festival, 2000
Rather late on a blue-sky optimum-temperature Sunday morning, I got myself together enough to set off for Strawberry Park. Alas, I hadn't noted until I crawled into the car and made sense of map and directions, that Strawberry Park is located out near PequotLand -- ie, way out there on the other side of this great state of Connecticut. I would have gotten started earlier. The word here is: plan ahead. Actually, this seems to be two words...
The drive was fine, if overlong, but I made it to the festival, pulled in, stretched a lot, and walked forever to the other side of Strawberry Park in order to find the concert area. Strawberry Park is a pretty interesting campground -- areas for regular tents, areas for trailers, areas for apparently-permanent structures that in some cases had better appointments and care than some regular homes I've seen. There were tennis courts and swimming pools, and places that served camp food. I wandered on past all of this, down to the hollow where the bluegrass merchants were, and beyond that, to where Jonathan Edwards performed his (non) bluegrass set. This is nicely situated as far as general campers -- who may not care about music -- are concerned.
A couple weeks prior to this, they'd hosted a Cajun-Zydeco festival on the same site. I'd been interested, but an extremely rainy weekend had inhibited my investigations at that time. Next year.
I wandered off to the merchanting area, and picked up lunch from what I later learned seemed to be merchants that hadn't left since the Cajun weekend. They were serving New Orleans style foods -- I ended up with crawfish and mussels, and curled up on a rock at the top of the listening area to listen to the next band, the Seldom Scene, as I wrestled with various shells and peppery exoskeletons.
The food was good. Obviously, they'd been freshening up their supply in the intervening weeks.
I looked around for some friends that I'd hoped to meet up with. It later turned out that a couple of them couldn't make it, but later on I ran into another friend and her husband, and we talked a fair bit. They were staying the whole weekend, trailer camping.
After the Seldom Scene played, it was the turn of the Lonesome River Band. Following this was the Dry Branch Fire Squad, and then a repeat performance by the Seldom Scene, with Jonathan Edwards coming back on stage to close out the weekend's festivities.
A good time, more of which is detailed under the links to specific performers, above.
