Last weekend, we shed the comfy confines of our apartments and left for what would surely be a crunchy experience. Over the three days we attended, life taugh us a series of lessons that can only be learned at Arise Music Festival. Here are the six lessons we learned. 

1. Sunrise Ranch is beautiful: Normally driving into a festival, you witness a blanket of cars, tents and large stages sprawling across an open field creating an anxiety that only whiskey can quel. But at Arise, Sunrise Ranch was an amazing landscape of rolling green hills, large rocks jetting from the earth similar to Morrison and tents spread out among the large green fields. It was hard to supress our inner hippie with such a peaceful setting.

2. Hippies are exactly what we thought they were: Unfortunately, we're still searching for our spirit animal. That wasn't the case with many of the performers who were well aware of their spirit animals and happy to tell you about them. If we weren't getting our face painted, we were getting a melodic entrancing surrounded by drums, dongs, gongs and performers or sitting in gigantic teepees seeing whether our legs could go behind our heads. Long story short, the vibrating gongs didn't sooth the soul and our legs were inevitably became dislocated.

3. There is a girl named Plastic Girl: Agent 108 as she called herself; Universal ambassador of the heart. While our campsite shared a wonderful embankment with hers, we still never found out what she did for a living – she wasn't a lawyer, that was for sure. All we could tell is that the carpet, surrounded by wood logs and accompanied by a colorfully decorative stack of sticks, were meant to fend off spirits. Turns out our cooking of hot dogs and the wafting smell was considered an evil spirit. Damn vegetarians. 

4. Shots help fend off a warm day: We didn't need Arise to help us discover this bit of knowledge but when the first shot hit our lips, it was heaven. Not necessarily the whiskey as much as the fact that we could withstand the heat. The mornings were warm, the days were hot and the evenings were perfect. 

5. Michael Franti killed it: We've seen Michael Franti at Red Rocks and other festivals. Not only has he gotten better but he put on a show that was well worth going to the festival. All the artists were entertaining but he seemed to bring an energy to the last day that transformed the vibe and made everyone want to stay another day. 

6. We'd definitely go again next year: When all was said and done, Arise festival pushed the possibility of festivals beyond the parking lots and cosmopolitan parameters. From the views to the people to the music and speakers, the entire event seemed to bring out a crowd that wanted to be there, loved being there and didn't want to leave. That's a festival worth going back to.