What’s a folk festival without the folks?

They came by bus and bike, in cars and kayaks, on foot and strollers. Some festivaled solo, others in packs. Most arrived accompanied by a few close friends or a handful of family.

They came for the fun, the food, the festive atmosphere and to soak up the live music they have always loved or never heard before. Some planted themselves at one venue and stayed there, letting the music and the people flow over and around them.

Most, however, wandered from the dance tent on the Kenduskeag Stream to a rise in front of the Railroad Stage before heading back the way they’d come to hit the Penobscot, Two Rivers and Heritage stages in between. People stopped in at the folk demonstrations and the craft tents, but it was the music that pulled them from one point to another.

Mikaela Bolduc, 20, Natalie Owens, 20, and Suong Nguyen, 19, all of Bangor, came to the festival for their last summer fling together before heading back to college next week. It was the fourth year the three Bangor High School graduates have attended the festival together.

Bolduc, a student at Colby College, will spend the year studying in France, while Owens and Nguyen will begin classes at the University of Maine in Orono. As they arrived at the festival Saturday afternoon, the trio agreed that they’d come for the music and in hopes of finding groups with “young guys” in them.

Pauline Draztowski of Hermon doesn’t drive anymore, so she hadn’t been able to get the festival in years past. This year she came with friends Harold “Peachy” Read of Orono and Yvonne Crockett of Hermon. Drazkowski and Crockett, both short and elderly, agreed that it was sometimes hard to get close enough to see the performers.

“All I can do is just open my ears and listen,” Crockett said Saturday afternoon.

New parents Carl and Karen Lin of Westbrook brought their 6-month-old daughter to her first folk festival. An educator for Maine Audubon, Karen Lin, 29, said that she enjoyed learning about the different cultures represented at the event.

The couple agreed that it was “something to fill up a weekend” and not too expensive for a young couple with a new baby.

Despite the switch this year from the National to the American Folk Festival, Carl Lin, 32, who works at a Portland hotel, said that he’d noticed no significant change.

“A rose is still a rose,” he said Saturday afternoon.