Hulaween 2023, and Associated Bumbling Around Atlanta and Jacksonville

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Suwannee Hulaween is one of the best music festivals in the US. It's an eclectic mix of jam and funk bands with EDM producers from a range of subgenres. I'd been to this once before, in 2021, and while I couldn't make it back in 2022, I did have the opportunity in 2023.

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

About a month before leaving, I reserved direct round-trip flights between Albuquerque and Atlanta on Delta, and I had enough SkyMiles racked up by then to get both flights for free. The flight out of Albuquerque would be leaving at 11:30am, and getting there on time from Clovis meant leaving as the sun was rising. The drive was OK, except for the construction delay I ran into on the highway between Fort Sumner and Santa Rosa.

In the airport I got myself a turkey and avocado sandwich for lunch from Schlotzsky's, one of my favorite national chain restaurants. It was only something like 10:30 in the morning, much earlier than I usually eat lunch, but since I was about to lose two hours flying east, it may as well have been after noon.

The flight left on time and was pretty uneventful. I spent most of the three hours in the air reading a book I bought in Santa Fe the year before, Bill Bryson's collection of Australian travelogues, In a Sunburned Country. It really made me want to visit Australia someday. Who knows when that someday will ever be?

The plane was scheduled to arrive in Atlanta at 4:35pm and it pulled up to the gate sometime around then. On the way to the baggage claim I stopped at a Peet's coffee and got an Americano with a fruit cup, and probably thanks to that, when I walked up to the baggage carousel my luggage was already on it! How often does that ever happen?

The next task was getting to my hotel. This time, unlike two years earlier, I didn't want to bother with Ubers and so planned ahead. The hotel was Holiday Inn Express Atlanta Airport West - Camp Creek. Getting there on transit wasn't that hard, but required some research ahead of time. First, I had to take the airport's SkyTrain to its station at the adjoining Gateway hotel complex. From there, I waited a few minutes and then stepped onto bus 82 and paid the $2.50 fare. (Imagine how much more I would've paid for Uber or Lyft!) This bus spent a little more than 20 minutes driving to the Camp Creek area; it wasn't all that far away, but the bus route kept taking it down one side street after another.

Camp Creek is one of those spread out blobs of strip malls, grocery stores, hotels, and huge parking lots that one often finds in suburbs and, as in this case, suburb-like areas within the limits of big cities. After I checked into the hotel, I walked over to Jason's Deli and got dinner, a Nutty Mixed Up Salad (chicken, feta, grapes, strawberries, raisins, walnuts, balsamic vinegar), did some last-minute grocery shopping for myself and the camping group at Publix, and checked out the nearest bus stop to plan my departure the next morning.

Thursday, October 26, 2023

I woke up at six in the morning, wanting to stay in bed a little longer because this would be the last real bed I'd sleep in for the next four days. The Holiday Inn Express served an even better breakfast than I expected; I got to have a western omelette, fried potatoes, a biscuit, a banana, and coffee.

After packing up and checking out, the trip to the Greyhound station went as smoothly as planned. Bus 82 showed up on time at 7:40 at the stop I scouted out the night before. It took 23 minutes to reach the Gateway hotel complex. Then I rode the Skytrain back to the airport where I got another coffee from Dunkin'. In the airport is a station for Atlanta's sparse-but-adequate subway system, where I boarded the red line train and rode that north to the Garnett station which was nearest the Greyhound station.

In the two years since the 2021 trip, Greyhound had decommissioned their old Atlanta station and built a new one across the street from it. This new one was cleaner and bigger than the old one, but more packed with people than the old one was on the morning of my 2021 trip.

This first leg of the trip from Atlanta to Hulaween was the longest. From 8:15 to 11:05 the bus drove south on Interstate 75 to Tifton, in southern Georgia, where it stopped at a convenience store and the passengers had time to get out and stretch our legs. We reboarded the bus and left Tifton at 11:40, and then nearly two hours later at 1:30 it finally pulled into the Lake City, Florida station.

Lake City's station was the same dirty old shack, with an uncomfortably crowded bathroom, that I remembered from two years earlier. Here I had to transfer to another bus to Jacksonville. This will certainly be the last time I go to Hulaween this way, not because I'm so turned off by the dirty bus stations but mostly just because of how inefficient this route was. Live Oak, where Hulaween happens, is literally just down the road to the west from Lake City, but because there's no way for me to get directly from one to the other, I had to ride east to Jacksonville just to catch a shuttle bus that would mostly cover the same ground going west.

So the second Greyhound spent something like an hour going east on I-10 to the Jacksonville bus terminal. My next stop after that was Jacksonville's airport, where I would catch the shuttle bus to Hulaween. Once again, I was determined to get to the airport on public transit and not Uber or Lyft, which was going to take some time because of how big Jacksonville is. Now here's some eyebrow-raising statistics about this city: Jacksonville has the largest land area of any city in the "lower 48" states, weighing in at 747.30 square miles, and in that huge space live only 990,931 people. Meanwhile New York City occupies 300.46 square miles--and that's still a lot compared to most other US cities--with 8,258,035 people. That means Jacksonville takes up more than twice the land area of the Five Boroughs of New York City, but with only about one ninth the population! This is why I spent over an hour riding bus 1A from the city center to the airport. But it was only a $1.50 fare (I had to pay $2 because I was out of coins and bus fare machines don't give change) so of course it was totally worth it.

(Statistics came from Wikipedia, with the populations being July 2023 estimates.)

After arriving at the airport, it was now 4:30pm on a day I'd mostly spent sitting on buses. Next time I go to Hulaween I'm definitely getting there by a different route. With an hour before the Hulaween shuttle bus leaving, I went inside and got a coffee from Southern Grounds. Jacksonville's airport terminal building looks really new and has this sleek, modern design. Someday I'll have to actually fly in or out of it.

5:30pm and one more bus to go! Thankfully, unlike the Greyhounds, this one was less than half full so I didn't feel like I was packed into a sardine can. So it was another hour or so ride west on I-10, mostly just retreading the same path taken by the second Greyhound a few hours earlier in the other direction. Near the end it passed right by Lake City and Live Oak and finally pulled into my final destination, the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park!

Unlike two years earlier, I already had my wristband so there was no waiting around for any behind-the-scenes muck-ups to get worked out. But also unlike that year, I couldn't remember how to get to the "drum circle" in the massive camping area, where I would be setting up my tent. I spent so much time walking up and down the festival area, dragging my much-battered old rollaround suitcase through the dust, asking this, that and the other person where the drum circle was, getting nothing but "I don't know" and "never heard of it" as replies. I'm not sure how I finally found the place; I think I may have asked someone where the much more well-known bat house was, and found my way from there. By the time I finally found the camp site and set up my tent, the sun had set and I had worked up a sweat after despondently searching for over an hour.

All my friends from South Carolina were at the Amphitheater watching John Summit. All I had to do now was make my way there, and I could remember how to get around by now...


Finally!! The long, arduous journey from that Atlanta hotel room was finally over. John Summit was down there in the distance on the stage. This photo was taken at 9:47pm, so it was just over 14 hours since I stepped on bus 82 outside the hotel, and just over 15 and a half hours since waking up.

I really wanted to relax with a beer or three at this point. And that's exactly what I did, with all the drink stands around, and all the wandering beer sellers dragging ice chest carts this way and that way around the festival. This is what the beer selection looked like that year:

  • SweetWater 420 Extra Pale Ale
  • Cigar City Florida Man IPA
  • At least one other IPA I didn't think to write down (it's not like I drink IPAs very much)
  • Yuengling
  • Stella Artois
  • Bud Light
  • Michelob Ultra

While waiting at the bar for one beer or another I remember a streaker running by. I was just standing there and then right out of nowhere a completely naked man ran by as fast as he could, with security people in hot pursuit.

John Summit's set was pretty good. While I was there he played the deadmau5 track "Ghosts 'n Stuff" (or was it "Moar Ghosts 'n Whatever"? One of those.), his remix of Kx5's "Escape," a dubstep remix of Avicii's "Levels," some drum 'n bass I didn't recognize but liked anyway, and his own "Human."

As much as I was enjoying this, I wanted to see what else was going on. Having finished however many beers, I got myself a whiskey sour from one of the bars and did some wandering. First I walked by the two big stages, the Meadow and the Hallows, the latter of which some band was playing on. By the time I'm writing this, the 2023 schedule has disappeared from the app, so I don't know who it was. Then I headed in the direction of Spirit Lake, and thus momentarily returned to the Amphitheater, where John Summit was still on. He was now playing a track I used to really enjoy in a bygone era, Planet Funk's "Chase the Sun."

Eventually I found myself on the shores of Spirit Lake. The area was greatly expanded from two years earlier; now, all the art and music spaces completely surrounded the lake instead of being on only one side of it.


Paul Kuhn's creations were back, as usual.


One of many small dancefloors scattered around Spirit Lake.

Friday, October 27, 2023

For breakfast that morning I looked around the food stands and got a steak breakfast burrito from a stand near the Hallows. With that, I also needed coffee to wake up, and there was a stand near there, Coffee Shack, which provided it all through the weekend.

Now would be a good time to look at all the food that was available, especially since that's what I did at that time, late Friday morning.

  • Coffee Shack - drip coffee, lattes, iced coffee, the usual stuff you'd expect
  • Higher Taste - Indian vegan food including fritters and samosas
  • Flaming Wok - Chinese food and breakfast plates
  • One rather large place serving breakfast burritos, Philly cheesesteaks, gyros, pitas, and falafel
  • Fresh Burger Ranch
  • A Louisiana-themed place selling stuff like jambalaya, po'boys, hush puppies, and mac 'n cheese
  • Dank Nugs - chicken nuggets, deep fried cauliflower, some other stuff
  • Tica's Tacos
  • Spontaneous Consumption - nachos, baked potatoes...
  • Umami Bites - wonton tacos, Vietnamese spring rolls, and potstickers
  • Island Noodles
  • Island Poké & Açaí - poke bowls, Korean barbecue, boba tea, and açaí bowls
  • Manna International Street Foods - samosas, bowls, burritos, tacos, lemonade
  • Wookie Dogs - corn dogs and kimchi (there's an unusual combination)
  • Home Slice Pizza
  • The Grilled Cheese Incident
  • Pierogi Posse - pierogi are boiled Polish dumplings filled with potato
  • Asian Sensation - chicken & vegetarian bowls, dumplings, iced tea, lemonade

There's probably a few I missed, but that about covers the spectrum of food to be found there. Additionally, at least two of these places also served something called "black lemonade" which I hate to admit I never tried.

Hulaween's house band, the String Cheese Incident, started their first set at 5...

Before the next set, I had to get some dinner, so I went to the Louisiana place for some jambalaya. What I got was supposed to be chicken and sausage jambalaya; it had very little chicken or sausage but a ton of rice. Still delicious though, I love Louisiana cooking. Also, while waiting in line at the place I unexpectedly ran into two people I had met at our group camp at Electric Forest four months earlier.

Lettuce took the Hallows stage next. Since I was first introduced to them two years earlier, when they played the Amphitheater stage at that year's Hulaween, I really wanted to see them again. I wasn't disappointed. Lettuce is a funk band that's been together since 1992, and yet somehow I'd never heard of them until 2021. Their set had a lot of improvisation, much like the jam bands that play this festival, but with horns.


Not the best photo of Lettuce

After some perusing of the vendor tents, getting another drink or two, and seeing the sun set, I found my way to the Amphitheater for Yung Bae. This is a DJ whose set at Electric Forest I heard a little bit of back in 2022. I liked this set here, it was funky and included disco and '80s R&B sounds.


Yung Bae playing at the Amph

Most of the rest of the night, after Yung Bae, I spent hanging around various spots in the Spirit Lake area.

Saturday, October 28, 2023

My first set of the day was in the mid-afternoon, with Champagne Drip's bass-heavy sounds at the Amphitheater.


Champagne Drip is way down there on the stage.

I spent the next couple hours or so watching Cheese's sets at the Meadow, as the field began to fill up with people in some noticeable costumes.


I had to capture this one. Look just below the center, you can see there's a whole group of people dressed as football refs, and they even brought a couple of down markers to complete the look.

There were also some people I needed to meet there, who had recently been to Tomorrowland, the huge festival in Belgium. We wanted to take a group photo with a Tomorrowland flag by the Hula sign, so we did that. Unfortunately I didn't see them again except for one more time on Sunday night, since cell phone reception was really bad.

After I'd had my fill of Cheese I went off to go drink some more, spend more money at the vendor tents, and get a bite to eat. From Umami Bites I got two spring rolls. These spring rolls were huge, something like two inches thick, way bigger than anything I've ever gotten at Panda Express. And they were also kinda bland.

Pretty Lights played a long two-hour set at the Meadow. I didn't know much about Pretty Lights and I hadn't listened to them much, but I know I saw them live once, way back in 2015 at the Euphoria festival in Austin. So, how to describe Pretty Lights? For someone like me who struggles with genre label definitions, they really defy description. The music was pretty mellow, they're a live band with not only a drummer and keyboardists but a DJ as well, and much like in a DJ set they mostly played continuously, bleeding one song into the next with very little stopping between songs. Both of their sets, Saturday and Sunday, can be found linked at the end of this blog.

The next part of the night has to be the most embarrassing part of this story. My friends had claimed a spot at the Meadow for most of the evening, and they had a big inflatable couch there. After buying and putting on some particularly garish clothes from several of the vendors, and finishing off drink number who-knows-what, I returned to our spot and passed out on the couch...and slept all the way through the String Cheese Incident's Big Shebang set!

Every year at both Electric Forest and Hulaween, the String Cheese Incident plays a set on Saturday night everyone calls "the Big Shebang." It's always a huge slew of cover songs, and at Hulaween, the Big Shebang always has a theme. Two years earlier, the theme was "dancing," and this time around, it was "full moon family reunion," because there was indeed a full moon in the sky that night. And I slept right through it, which I still can't believe. Based on the few videos I was able to scrounge up--they're all linked further down the page--the set included the Police's "Walking on the Moon," Dua Lipa's "Levitate," Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop the Feeling," and Mary J. Blige's "A Family Affair."

I still can't believe I slept through that whole set. I know I heard the first song--it may have been "Dancing in the Moonlight," I'm not sure anymore--and the fireworks at the end woke me up.

Sunday, October 29, 2023

After some unusually heavy drinking the night before made me sleep all the way through Cheese's Big Shebang, I decided to completely avoid alcohol on Sunday. Also, I would mostly be going it alone that day, since my friends I was camping with all had to pack up and hit the road early in the morning.

I had a bit of a late breakfast, a samosa and more spring rolls. I got the samosa from that great Indian food stand near the Hallows, Higher Taste, in the same spot it was in 2021. Samosas are deep-fried pastries with various vegetable fillings, and this food stand was selling single samosas under the amusing name "The Last Samosa." So you'd walk up to the stand and say "I'd like the Last Samosa," as if there were only one left.


The first set I caught was this band, Trousdale. They were all right.

While waiting for Veil to start, I walked around Spirit Lake a bit to check out some of the art.


This big wooden spider, which only has four legs, has long been a fixture of Spirit Lake and was noticeably absent in 2021, the only other time I was here. That huge rear end is hollow, and you can climb inside through that hole and sit on the bench ringing the inside. If you ever hear any Hulaween veterans talk about "climbing in the spider's butthole," this is what they mean.

Veil took the Spirit Lake stage at 2:00 in the afternoon. Her set was mostly a slow, hypnotic kind of dubstep. I liked it.

After Veil, I went to another food stand for lunch: an Island Noodle Bowl with teriyaki chicken.

NotLö took the Spirit Lake stage after Veil. This set was mostly the same kind of slow bass music that her frequent collaborator Veil played, but with some DnB in the mix as well.

After NotLö, I was at the Amphitheater for someone I'd never heard of, QRTR. As usual, I'm not very good with genre and sub-genre labels. I think this was...deep house?

The next, and last set I really wanted to see was Elderbrook, but he wouldn't be going on until 7:00, so I still had a couple more hours and change to kill, which I mostly spent between the Meadow and the Hallows.


Cheese was doing their last incident of the festival in the late afternoon.

From one food stand, Dank Nugs, I got some "veggie nugs." These were a few pieces of fried and breaded cauliflower, which were pretty tasty.

Back at the Amphitheater, Giolì & Assia were spinning some great trance...


Giolì & Assia were good enough to keep me around for the rest of the set.

After Giolì & Assia, I listened to most of Mt. Joy, a folky rock band, over at the Hallows. While over there, I met with the Tomorrowland people again, this time with more people who wanted another group photo which we did by the HULA sign again.

Elderbrook, one of the artists I really wanted to see at this festival, would be going on at the Amphitheater at 7:00. So I got dinner from a food stand, a fried beef pie, and then left the Hallows while Mt. Joy were still playing.

Finally, Elderbrook. I'd first found out about Elderbrook thanks to "Cola," the track he'd made with Camelphat back in 2018, and have been listening to him more the past two years. He's more than just a producer-DJ, he sings all his own music and plays several different instruments. This set started with "Numb," which really set the somewhat dark vibe for the rest of the hour.


Elderbrook

After Elderbrook was over, I found my way back to the Meadow for the end of Pretty Lights' second set. Not bad, not all that different from their Saturday night set.

Pretty Lights was the last official set of the festival. But Spirit Lake was still full of life and would be well into the night. First, let's get a look at those amazing lights over the titular lake.


It's impossible to get a good photo of this. You simply have to be there and watch it with your own eyes. There are devices out on the lake that spray mist into the air, and the fantastic light system projects all these three-dimensional animations on the mist.

Moving around the lake, I found the House of Lost Plague Church. It was a little bigger than in 2021.


Looks like they were just setting up a sound system here. It wouldn't be long until this space turned into a nightclub.


The Incendia crew were back with their fiery stage. I don't know who was behind the turntables here, since I haven't ever found any published schedules for these unofficial stages.


This is the archway over the entrance to the Spirit Lake area. The lights were constantly changing, giving the glowing psychedelic art the appearance of moving.


This contraption shot fire out of its arms and head.


Back at the House of Lost Plague Church. Wow, it sure did get packed!


In this tent, a DJ was wrapping his set up, after which would be a huge game of Bingo.

Sometime not long after 10pm is when I decided to call it a night and head back to my tent. The morning after I had a bus to catch, and so didn't want to stay up too late and miss it.

Monday, October 30, 2023

When I woke up Monday morning, the weather was rainy. Even knowing that most food stands were closed and being packed up, I'd hoped to get something for breakfast from somewhere like the Grilled Cheese Incident, but sadly all that was still open was Coffee Shack. "Breakfast" ended up being a latte and a muffin.


Construction crews breaking down the Meadow stage on a foggy, rainy Monday morning.

My shuttle bus to Jacksonville wasn't leaving until 10:00 so I had about an hour and a half. When the rain stopped I sluggishly packed up my tent. On the way to the main gate, where the bus was waiting, I caught glimpses of the stages being taken apart.


The Amphitheater being reverted to it's non-Hulaween appearance.


The Meadow almost completely dismantled.

So the bus spent its usual two hours and change heading east on I-10 to the Jacksonville airport. As soon as I stepped off the bus I headed inside the airport, right back to the last place I was at before leaving here Thursday afternoon: Southern Grounds, the coffee shop. This time not just for coffee but lunch, a pita sandwich they took forever to make.

The next phase of this journey would be two days in the lovely city of Savannah, Georgia, where I would be traveling to by train later that day. Amtrak's northbound Silver Meteor was scheduled to leave Jacksonville at 5:11 in the afternoon. That was still something like four hours away. The first of those hours was spent on another long bus ride from the airport to the downtown bus station.

No, we're still not done here, because I've got a couple things to report about Jacksonville before I finally end this blog. First, the Skyway. Jacksonville actually has a monorail system, the Skyway, that only serves downtown. It's not very big and only has eight stations, making me wonder how many people actually use it. Next to the bus transit hub was the Skyway's LaVilla station, from which I rode on one of the monorail cars--it's completely free of charge--a couple stations east to Central. The train worked just fine, but considering how sparse the system is, how little ground it covers, it really seems more like a gimmick for tourists and less like a real public transit system.

From the central station I walked to a local brewpub, Bold City Downtown on E. Bay St. Since I didn't want to burn up too much time, I only had a pint of Duval Light. It was a pretty good light ale.

I wanted to get to the train station with time to spare, so I left the pub after only one beer. After walking back to the bus station, not bothering with the monorail, I boarded another bus bound for the Amtrak station. This took something like a half hour, because Jacksonville is that spread out, the Amtrak station is that far away from downtown, and being a public transit bus, the bus made a lot of stops and its route wasn't exactly direct.

And now we're finally at the end of this part of the trip. The Silver Meteor showed up on time, and it left at 5:11 with me on it, bound for Savannah...

Videos of Sets from the Festival

For some unknown reason, hardly any live sets from Hulaween 2023 are on YouTube. There used to be a lot more up there, in the first two or three months after the festival, but most of them were taken down at some point in 2024. The few links below are all that's left.

Hulaween 2023 Trip:

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