Wed 24 – Sun 28 June 2015
After not seeing anything of Brussels, we hit the road for the obscure town of Werchter where we had tickets for a four day music festival. This was Natalie’s first music festival and Matt’s first one outside of the UK. At least he knew what to expect! There were mostly Belgians, Dutch and Germans at the festival of 88,000. Our campsite, the Hive, held 30,000 and had market stall, toilets, showers and a big dance hall and bar.
We arrived in the afternoon for early camping. Two very long and tiring trips from the car, we got all set up and made a plan of what bands we wanted to see on each day. Then we met up with Matt’s friend from Revs, Charlie and her friend Meg. The four of us went to the festival opening party and had a blast. It wasn’t too hard to fall asleep that night!
The days followed a similar pattern; get up as it was too hot to sleep past 9:30am, make breakfast, have a little sponge bath, make lunch, head to the festival (sometimes coming back for dinner, sometimes getting dinner from the strip – local businesses spotting an amazing business opportunity!). The campsite was half a mile from the festival so we did lots of walking in five days!
We saw lots of bands including: Eagles of Death Metal, Royal Blood (twice), Rise Against, Faith No More, The Chemical Brothers, Damian Marley, Mumford and Sons, Pharrell Williams, Hozier, Ryan Adams, Lenny Kravitz, The Prodigy, Enter Shikari, The Vaccines, Counting Crows, The Script, Kasabian and…MUSE!!!
Funny story about the last day though. We were on about 3-4 hours of sleep and wanted to get a good spot for Muse – we had scouted out a good spot that we wanted to try but we had to get there early. After an early dinner at 3pm we took our place near the front. It was only an 8 hour wait until Muse came on at 11 but we wanted to stick it out! We were about 15 rows back, centre stage and had a great view of all of the other bands that were on in the lead up. But Natalie, being as precious as she is, was tired, hot, dehydrated and not enjoying being crammed in like a tin of sardines. The Muse fans were wild and it was great to be in amongst the excitement but after about 30 minutes Natalie started having a small panic attack and had to be pulled out and taken to the First Aid tent. Luckily we only missed 1.5 songs and were able to see the rest of the concert (from the side but still an ok view). Matt was very understanding but we were both disappointed considering we went to the festival to see Muse. Oh well, lesson learned.
All in all it was an amazing experience! If a bit overwhelming and exhausting it was something Natalie would love to do again (and obviously Matt would do it all summer long if he could).
Next stop Amsterdam 🙂
Purple Moose Tales 