Week of September 27th 2010: (Part II) Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival

San Francisco is known for festivals. Ok, maybe not known for them, but if you live here you know that in the summer and fall there are festivals and concerts almost every weekend. It's really fun to check some of them out and I admit, I've been horrible about going to them. The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival is probably one of the ones I've been the worst about.. it is a 3 day festival in Golden Gate Park, it's completely free and I'd only heard good things about it.

The Festival is mostly bluegrass but as the title suggests, it's not strictly limited to it. In fact, MC Hammer is known to make an appearance some years...  The fair if Friday-Sunday one weekend a year and I decided that I would go for a couple of hours on both Saturday and Sunday. Arriving at the festival, I was immediately surprised at how big of a production it was. The event was also very popular. It almost felt like a time warp... I could see exactly was San Francisco must have looked like in the sixties.

I'm not very familiar with bluegrass festival but I found a couple of more mainstream acts to go see. On Saturday, I wanted to see Fountains of Wayne so once we got there we wandered around looking for their stage (which happened to be just about on the opposite side of the park). The band was fun to watch and they did a couple of covers, a little bit of Bluegrass and of course, "Stacey's Mom." We also were standing next to a guy that had the fluffiest dog I'd ever seen in my life. I have no idea why I didn't get a picture of it but the thing looked like a bear and was super sweet.

After Fountains of Wayne, we decided to wander a bit. Shannon wanted to get some kettle corn and I was little hungry as well so we hunted around for some food. As much as Shannon like kettle corn (a whole lot), I love seafood so when I saw a crab and shrimped stuffed artichoke stand, I knew I was in heaven. The stand carved out the center of the artichoke and stuffed it and then covered the whole thing in a crab louie sauce. Every part of it was amazing and again I am wondering why I didn't get a picture of something...

On Sunday, I was excited to see Elvis Costello. The festival was much more crowded on this day and especially near Elvis's stage. Try and I eventually managed to get near the stage and find a place to sit down. It was a fun set to watch and by the time he was done, the Giants had qualified for the playoffs! There is nothing like listening to good music and then having your baseball team win an important game!

Try and I had fun watching the band but when they were done we decided to just head home since we didn't want to fight through the crowds.

The concert was very fun and it was nice wandering around and listening to music that is outside my typical interest. The food stands were good and not too pricey (relative to some events). I wish it had been just a little less crowded though!