Download Festival and British Weather

Well it has been quite while since I last blogged! Here is my experiences of my first Download Festival.

Okay I normally go to Sonisphere, which i had tickets to, but is sadly cancelled this year. Well This year we were going to go to three festivals as our alternative honeymoon. We used the refund from Sonisphere to go to Belgium and Luxembourg, which incidentally  was the last thing I blogged about. I think.

So Download. We chose download because of Soundgarden's presence, and we were quite looking forward to the festival.

I have been a little under the weather and decided to decorate the inside of the car the evening before we drove to Derby for Download Festival. So I was banished to my bed for the rest of the evening and I had to leave the packing to Martin and John, which I wasn't happy about because I normally pack with German skill and efficiency. Lucky, my greatest fears were soon gone as I discovered that nothing had been forgotten, phew! (Last year John forgot his sleeping bag.) Download festival is a five day long music festival, well the bands only play for 3 days. The weather man threatened rain, but it was fairly dry most of the 3 hour drive, I slept through most of it as I was still nauseous. (I forgot to mention that the only air freshener for the car that the boys could find was a horribly sickly sweet vanilla scent. Yuck.) That didn't really help me feel better. We got to the makeshift car park/field and the heavens opened, so we forgot to check the location of our car. We decided to take the most important equipment first and return for the other items once we had pitched our tent. The walk to the camp site was a 2 mile trek, with copious amounts of baggage and gravel paths, and a flipping road bridge with steep stairs. We got to the camp site managed to find just enough room for us to pitch our tent near some friendly geordies. I was still feeling pretty ill and didn't want to sit about so John and I walked the 2 miles back to the car. Except we must have walked lots more as we spend 2 hours wandering around the car park as we had lost our bright red hyundai. The heavens decided that this wasn't enough and opened again. As you can imagine, the first and last days of festivals are where relationships amongst friends and loved ones are really tested and emotions run high. The physical stress of carrying a lot of equipment and being herded like cattle is not fun. We had our bucket barbie confiscated, even though they were supposedly permitted on the camp site. I got a bit annoyed at the steward, because we had loads of sausages and burgers that we now could not cook, what a jobsworth he was! By the end of the first day we were wet, cold and hungry and the mud had already been trampled on by thousands of people and everyone was a bit cheesed off.

What that steward didn't know is that we had got 5KG of coal through the barrier and  a wok, so I cooked our food in a makeshift wok, coal cooker thing. I did feel like taking the wok to the back of the steward"s head, if I am honest!

Sleeping was okay, but it is always hard to adjust to the level of noise at festivals from thousands of people drunkenly gibbering away. We were camped right underneath the take-off and landing paths of East Midlands Airport. The planes landing were not a problem, but the take-offs made you wake up feeling as if you were under siege!  

Day two was just sitting about in our tent waiting for the rain to pass, this wasn't just rain as we brits know it, it was serious torrential down pour. Due to the rain and cold temperatures our clothes didn't dry out at all! Luckily the boys had packed a sensible amount of changes, and we were putting the wet clothes on in the porch before going outside. 

Day 3 was the first day of music so it was a bit better, but I think everyone was quite fed up. The stages opened 2 hours late, you know everything in Britain stops for *bad weather*. I think this was some serious bad planning on the organiser's part. The first few bands couldn't get into things with half the stage area closed. John went to see Slash who put on a fantastic show, and we went to see The Prodigy, which were equally as good, but I couldn't really get into them, as I was cemented into the mud!

Day four Martin picked up some norovirus and was unpleasantly unwell, so we had to trudge through the mud with a very pale and unhappy Martin to the welfare tent. They couldn't really help and just asked for a sample from Martin which as he couldn't wash his hands due to being in a field, he didn't bother with! I can't say I blame him. John and I were thankfully okay, and the portable toilets were not too bad, I have seen worse. we all made sure we had seperate drinking bottles, and took great advantage of the on site drinking water taps. We decided then to pack up our tents the next morning and leave on Sunday night after the last band, as we had just had enough and really didn't want to stay an extra night. Metallica headlined and were excellent as usual. The played the Black album in it's entirety, the only bad point of that show, was the drugged up loopy miss dancing in front of me the whole show.

Day 5 was quite nice and the mud which was up to our knees had started to dry out, which was slightly harder to wade through. I don't have any pictures but you can imagine. I am surprised that we all managed to keep our feet dry as I can guess that a few people probably contracted trench foot. The way back to the car which we had now found visual reference points for was quite hard and we did it in two trips again. All that walking! It was 16 miles over five days to and from the car (we went two trips twice) and the stages were a good 3 miles from the camp site, so that was 6 miles for the last three days, through thick mud. I think we walked about 34 miles! We drove through the night after Black Sabbath's show (which was very, very good) and it took us an hour to leave the car park, because some muppet decided to have a crash just outside. (How inconsiderate). It took us 3 hours, which the two of us switching to avoid falling asleep at the wheel and we finally got in at 4 am and just in time for sunrise! I can't say it was an overly bad experience, but it would have been an awful camping holiday without the bands. 

I am not the biggest fan of camping. Although I do love the outdoors. Peculiar.