Mysteryland 2014

A few weeks ago I drove my car 2 hours north in a caravan of friends to join 20,000 other people at Mysteryland's US debut on the historic hills of Woodstock at Bethel Woods Arts Center.

When I got home I tried to write a blog post about it...but the only sentence I could get out was,

"I just had the most amazing weekend."

So I took a bit of a break and, two and a half weeks later, here I am - attempting to put into words what I experienced, what my friends experienced, and what I'm sure thousands of other people experienced on that sacred ground.

But I'm not going to do that.

It was too special for me to go back now and rehash every detail for those who weren't there.

So I'll say just a few words and then leave you with the pictures....a picture's worth a thousand words after all...right?

Mysteryland is described as the world's longest running electronic music festival, hosting its first event in the Netherlands in 1993. Until this year the festival had only been hosted in Europe and Chile. On its 25th anniversary in 2014, Mysteryland crossed the waters and came to the US. Touching ground over Memorial Day Weekend, what made it so eagerly anticipated was the fact that Mysteryland US was the first music festival to return to the grounds where Woodstock took place in 1969.

Let that sink in for a second.

Forty-five years have passed since legends like Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead graced the stage in front of hundreds of thousands of young people who believed in peace, who believed in the power of music, and who believed that their generation was changing the course of music in the world forever.

Forty-five years later, the biggest electronic music acts were helicoptered in to a series of stages on the camp ground to perform and play in front of tens of thousands of young people who still believe in peace, who still believe in the power of music, and who know that their generation has already changed the course of music in the world forever.

It was incredibly surreal to look back and see hundreds of flower crown wearing hippies of this generation swaying to music that has become absolutely pivotal in their lives and imagine looking back on a similar scene of those same flower crowns swaying in the breeze as the Woodstock attendees took in the music that they could not live without.

We were in that same spot of history and it was repeating the scene in its entirety.

I fell in love all over again...with the music, with TT, with my friends, with people I had never even met who smiled at me when we made eye contact across the grass.

Mysteryland was not just a music festival...it was a human experience that was shared between a group of friends and 20,000 other strangers. And it created memories that will last a lifetime:)