Winfield Festival pulled people from all over- Even DC.

Winfield's 36th annual Walnut Valley Festival, which attracts about 15,000 people, has come and gone. The music festival is known as bluegrass, or simply Winfield, and it pulls people from all over- New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and, of course, Douglas County.
Though Winfield is a 150 miles from DC, many people take off work or school to drive to the campgrounds and sleep in tents.
Last year, Lawrence resident Dave Learned and his buddies purchased a bus, for $1,000 dollars on Ebay, to drive to the festival. The group took the bus again this year.
"We needed a large commercial vehicle and all the RV's we could afford were really crappy," Learned said. "So we got the bus instead."
At the festival, the smell of campfire filled the air. Tents sat side by side. Festival goers lounged and milled and mingled in the campgrounds, creating a temporary community where strangers became friends, and musicians strummed guitars and banjos at all hours of the night.
Bluegrass is host to a variety of musical performers, from the professional to the beginner. There are four main stages that musicians perform on. Shows are scheduled until midnight. But when the official stages close, artists meander down to Stage 5, the most popular, unofficial stage that campers started.
This year Split Lip Rayfield, a crowd favorite, played at Stage 5, on the last night of the festival. Kirk Rundstrom, former lead singer of Split Lip Rayfield died in February, so the band played in his memory. The performance attracted several hundred people, and even after the stage closed at 3 a.m., musicians sparked jam sessions with strangers well into the morning hours.

But Bluegrass is over and many are adjusting back to reality. The swift shift is as sharp as a dagger. It's hard to fight the mental tug toward the week of drunken stupidity, great music and fun. To sooth the sting, many are reconnecting to artists saw and friends made through social networks like Myspace.

People have used the site to assemble pages in honor of stages, campsites, and musicians. Learned and the bus crews' campsite has its own page, as does Stage 7, (the newest unoffical stage) and a plethora of bluegrass musicians. The festival itself even has a page called "Winfield" with over 1,500 friends.

Now that the Internet supplies easy access to bluegrass artists and friends, maybe the next 50 weeks will pass by much more smoothly.