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OkeeFest: A Florida Music Festival Feast for the Senses

The main stage at Okeechobee Music Festival (image courtesy Adam McCullough.com)

We make no secret at RoadtripMojo that our first love is jam bands. We’ll travel almost a thousand miles – and fly even farther – to see bands that turn a three-minute song into a 15-minute improvisational frenzy. But when an event like Okeechobee Music Festival springs up each year 90 miles from our South Florida homes, a two-hour drive is a no-brainer. Truth be told, OMF is heavy into electronic dance music, or EDM. But with some “real” bands on hand, like Turquaz, Lettuce, Big Gigantic, Slightly Stoopid, Trombone Shorty, and a few others, we figured it was worth a day trip. Man, was it ever…

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RVing and Music Festivals: Making Bicycles Welcome

Curt Manufacturing clamp-on bike rack (image courtesy eTrailer)

When we bought our Ford F150 to tow our travel trailer to music festivals and campgrounds, we thought we had all the capacity we needed. With a four-door crew cab spacious enough for five and a large bed with a hard tonneau cover, we envisioned loading it with lots of stuff and room to spare. Except, we came to find, for our bikes. With the bed packed with other camping supplies and our trailer manufacturer fairly adamant about never attaching anything to the rear bumper or installing a hitch to the stern, how would we shuttle our bikes to our fav fests? We found that a number of manufacturers have it all figured out. Now, which solution was best…?

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The Most Important Piece of Camping Gear: Flashlights

From HikingTier’s Best Camping Flashlight

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right. Sometimes no matter how hard you look for something, there just isn’t enough light for the task. Camp at enough music festivals and inevitably you get caught in the dark.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been searching the tow vehicle (TV), the storage compartment in the camper, or making my way through a thick stand of sitting / resting / raging music fans in total blackness. Many of our best camping festival sites are steeped in total darkness once the sun goes down.

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Sugaree: A Psychedelic Spin on the Music Festival RV

Psychedelic rides are nothing new to the Grateful Dead or music festival scene. Whether VW microbuses or the original Further itself, bright rides are as common as trippy tunes. But Sugaree, a converted GMC school bus, puts a vivid new spin on the music festival RV / tour bus. Dad David McQuaid calls it their “schoolie conversion into our psychedelic hippie bus.”

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A Sit Down With Producer Paul Levine: From Farmhouse Parties to the Perfect Multiday Camping Festival

Paul Levine at Fool’s Paradise

Like many music festival producers, Paul Levine didn’t chart his career path. It formed over time, culminating in his role as a producer of such events as Suwannee Hulaween, Bear Creek, the Aura Festival, Fool’s Paradise, and Purple Hatter’s Ball and his role at one of the most celebrated RV and festival camping destinations, the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, Florida. It started when Levine was a student at Lehigh University outside Philadelphia from 1987 to 1991. He’d travel to Grateful Dead shows throughout the Northeast. Having banked 100 or more shows, Levine found himself in his dorm room one day wondering how to get the Dead to play Lehigh?

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