We went to Coachella for the first time this weekend. Here are the 10 best and 10 worst things about the festival.

Styles was our favorite headliner of the weekend. He did it all: launched the show with his delectable new single "As It Was," sang two duets with Shania Twain, gave "boyfriends everywhere" a hearty "fuck you," and got a Coachella crowd to scream along to a One Direction hit.

Although it was Styles' first time on the festival stage, you never would've known it. He oozed enthusiasm and confidence from every sparkly sequin.

There's a reason why Coachella is the quintessential destination for Instagram lovers. It's very difficult to gaze around at mountains and palm trees in every direction and feel completely unmoved.

The skyline of Indio, California is simply magical, particularly when accented by the festival's signature Ferris wheel and art installations.

For many musicians, joining Coachella's iconic lineup is an honor and career milestone. They often seem eager to make their performances feel special, and one surefire way to do that is to give fans a taste of new music.

The April festival also tends to kick off festival season, taking place at a time when many artists are gearing up to release summer singles or full-length projects.

This year, Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat both debuted new songs, while Styles performed two unreleased tracks from his forthcoming album "Harry's House."

Another way to make a performance feel special is an unexpected cameo. This is a strategy that's wholeheartedly embraced by Coachella performers, almost to the point where it's expected.

Headliners Styles and Billie Eilish opted to pay homage to their forerunners by bringing out Twain and Damon Albarn, respectively.

Several others asked collaborators to perform their hit duets, like Doja Cat, who welcomed Tyga for "Freaky Deaky" and Rico Nasty for "Tia Tamera," and Daniel Caesar, who was joined by Justin Bieber for a low-key rendition of "Peaches."

Bridgers and Parks haven't released any songs together, so when Parks joined Bridgers onstage to sing "Graceland Too" and "I Know the End," it was truly thrilling. Their voices meshed beautifully and we could tell that both women were having a blast.

Although people would pack together and push to the front for evening performers and headliners, we found this wasn't true for earlier shows.

Many audiences were more sparse and relaxed than we expected, presumably because Coachella is so huge and there are so many artists to see, everyone is spread out. We were able to get super close to celebrated artists like Arcade Fire and Japanese Breakfast, both of whom performed before sunset, without much effort at all.

Coachella is a massive production and well-oiled machine. For the majority of the weekend, artists arrived onstage exactly when they were supposed to.

The festival crew was able to dismantle sets and build new ones remarkably fast, so fans had very little time to wait in between performances.

For example, Doja fans only had to wait about 40 minutes after Karol G left the stage, despite the latter's complex set design.

Believe it or not, TikTok's favorite songs sound even better and more addictive live. Doja threads her hit-packed setlist with punchy drums and electric guitar riffs, including a punk-rock version of her No. 1 smash "Say So" that had us convinced she was born to make the next "Live Through This."

Beyond the music itself, Doja gave fans a true performance, complete with several costume changes and elaborate choreography.

Girl in red, whose birth name is Marie Ulven Ringheim, admitted during her set that she wasn't feeling her best — but had she not said anything, no one would have been able to tell.

Her energy levels were up from the very second she hit the stage, continuing to give an impassioned performance of her hits, including "We Fell in Love in October," "Serotonin," and "Bad Idea!"

For her final song, "I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend," she fully transformed into a rock star by shredding on her guitar and capping off the set with some crowd surfing — despite being warned against it.

"I was specifically told, 'Maria, there's not enough people to stage dive. Don't do it.' So I'm not going to do it," she said, before inspecting the audience and deciding to give it a try anyway.

While the entire set was incredible, that finale took the experience up several notches, making it one of the standout sets of the entire weekend.

Due to her set time, Rogers potentially had a lot working against her — Sunday was by far the hottest out that it'd been all weekend, the crowd was fully exposed to the beating sun, and by day three, people were utterly exhausted.

But all of those issues faded into oblivion the second she strutted out to "Give a Little."

Throughout her set, Rogers deliver an inspired mashup of "Retrograde" and Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," came through with powerful vocals, and commanded the stage with ease.

Absolutely everything about Rogers' 45 minutes on the Coachella stage was pure electric.

But your spot in a crowd can make or break your experience at a concert. However, much to our delight, there was no better audience than the one that showed up for Rogers on Sunday. Everyone around us was fully immersed in the experience, shouting every word and, at one point, chanting, "Maggie! Maggie! Maggie!" between tracks.

We were all so engaged with the performance that it came as a genuine shock when she announced the final song. It's criminal she wasn't given a full hour onstage.

Of course, much of this downfall depends on when you try to arrive at the festival, but some of the traffic we encountered was baffling.

The Coachella website explicitly tells fans not to trust GPS and to follow their directions instead. But there's not much in the way of signage when approaching the grounds.

If you come from the wrong direction, you may find yourself driving in circles, constantly rerouted by unexplained traffic cones, blockages, and lines of cars with no end in sight.

On Sunday, after leaving at 2 p.m. and driving 40 minutes from Palm Springs, it took us an additional 90 minutes to get inside the grounds.

Although we've heard good things about Coachella's shuttle service, it only operates from local hotels, whose rooms sell out extremely quickly and cost a pretty penny. The shuttle itself isn't cheap either; a weekend pass will put you out $84, plus fees.

As for ride-sharing apps, that can be a tricky gamble. One festivalgoer we spoke to tried to call an Uber and was forced to wait for well over an hour. Around 2 a.m., she gave up and begged a friend to pick her up.

Renting a car to drive to and from the festival made the most sense for our schedule and budget. But we did not anticipate how painful parking would be.

Each day, it took at least 20 minutes to actually get inside the festival after arriving. That may not seem like a lot, but in 90-degree heat with blisters on our feet, it felt like an eternity.

After a long day of walking and dancing, returning to the car was even worse, especially since the headliners didn't finish performing until around 1 a.m. By then, we were exhausted.

Due to the sheer size of the festival grounds, attendees need to walk a lot.

When you're spending multiple hours on your feet for three days in a row, it's inevitable that your feet will be aching by the end, but the odds of getting a blister go way up, too.

We each developed several blisters on the bottom of our feet throughout the weekend, so the only day we weren't traipsing around in pain was Friday.

On Saturday morning, we stopped at a store to buy Band-Aids, ibuprofen, and gel insoles for our shoes to help ease the pain. However, we were able to do this because we were driving to the festival each day — if we were camping on-site, we would likely have had to suffer.

Before setting out to the festival on day one, we saw a TikTok video of a woman advising festivalgoers to bring a face covering and a Neti pot because "the dust is not a little game."

When we got there, though, we were surprised that the grounds were covered in grass and foolishly believed the dust wouldn't be an issue.

However, the path back to the parking lot is a completely different terrain and was insanely dusty at night.

After making the long trek back to our car every evening, we'd spend the entire 45-minute drive to our Airbnb in Palm Springs coughing and sneezing.

Coachella's set times weren't released until Thursday, one day before the festival was scheduled to kick off.

Of the many artists we were excited to see, several were scheduled for the same time on different stages: girl in red and Rina Sawayama; Kim Petras, FINNEAS, and Orville Peck; Japanese Breakfast and Arlo Parks; Denzel Curry and Jessie Reyez; Holly Humberstone and Beach Bunny.

It was easy to justify the high cost of attendance when the lineup was released, thanks to the promise of seeing an abundance of great performances. But in reality, we were only able to see a fraction of what we'd hoped for.

Coachella is billed as far more than a music festival — it's an experience at the intersection of fashion, celebrity, and art. Thusly, there are plenty of people who aren't there to sing and dance.

This apathy was obvious to us from the jump. At several shows, we were surrounded by people who were either completely immobile or infuriatingly chatty, even when we were very close to the stage.

During Bridgers' emotional performance, for example, many people in the audience were talking all the way through her songs — to the point where people on Twitter noticed the volume of their conversations in our videos.

"The people talking through this… i would've lost my shit," one person said.

I, Callie, have been to countless music festivals across the country. They nearly always take place in the summer and I'm very accustomed to that sweaty experience.

But the heat at Coachella was an entirely different level. Immediately upon arriving, the sunlight felt oppressive. It was sometimes difficult just to walk across the field without getting exhausted, and despite drinking five or more bottles of water per day, I felt dizzy more than once.

Again, we know this is how the desert works, but it got significantly colder at night. The smartest choice was to bring a jacket, but given the heat during the day, that was a tedious task.

Although experts say the risk of contracting COVID in an outdoor setting is far lower, the densely packed crowds at Coachella seem to negate that benefit. It would've made us far more comfortable if we had some assurance that our fellow patrons were vaccinated — or, at least, had recently tested negative for the deadly virus.

There were already several security checkpoints to get into the festival, so it doesn't seem like adding one more to approve vaccination cards would've been much trouble.

It was Sunday night. We were tired. And we were told The Weeknd would arrive at 10:20 p.m.

Instead, he showed up at 11:40, after Swedish House Mafia took the stage 35 minutes late and performed a more-or-less-complete setlist.

As many of our fellow festivalgoers agreed, we were under the impression that Swedish House Mafia would act as more of a DJ for The Weeknd's headlining show, or their performances would be weaved together.

But by the time The Weeknd finally appeared to perform hits like "Blinding Lights," "The Hills," and "Starboy," we could barely summon the energy to tap our feet.