Adventurous visiting friends from Maine -- on their way home from a drive that included stops in Idaho and Louisiana! -- were what it took to get me to the closing day of FloydFest on Sunday, and we had a great time.
I tend to prefer small venues to crowds myself -- and prefer moonlight to sunstroke -- but the festival has its share of smaller stages and shady corners.
(Folks who paid a last-minute $70 thinking they were going to arrive mid-afternoon for the closing Alison Krause concert -- as if it were a stadium concert -- were certainly disappointed by parking lot and shuttle-bus jam-ups, and then finding no reasonable place to sit and watch on the already well-staked-out concert lawn. Maybe some "acts" are too big for this venue?)
My favorites: Local heroes DotDotDash did a fine morning contradance, which could be an alternative Sunday morning form of worship... and catching part of the two gospel acts later in the day probably provided absolution for saying such a thing. I also thought the Molasses Creek band from Ocracoke Island was charming, playing mostly on the children's area stage, mixing new songs, old songs and humor. (They even did "Sweet Violets" nicely for a Sunday morning, making me wonder whether they have a less kid-friendly late-night version for the Ocracoke saloon trade.)
My big failure was not checking my camera's battery before I threw it in the backpack, and not bringing the spare. I may get some pictures uploaded here from my Droid phone, but there will be better ones elsewhere:
BlueRidgeMuse
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