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Published: June 28th 2014
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We were up nice and early to take the train back to Charles de Gaulle to meet the Swedes. Nik had texted overnight to confirm that they'd finally made it to Paris and would be at Terminal Two waiting for us. We hadn't seen Nik, Elin, Emil and Klara for over a year so there was much excitement and catching up to do.
Our first order of business as a group of six was to collect our rental car. It was a brand new VW Sharon seven-seater and we somehow managed to fit all our gear into the boot and one of the seats, leaving Emil to squeeze into the remaining back seat. This didn't take too long to sort out but the GPS was another story altogether. We figured out how to enter Nantes as the destination and took off out of the carpark only to end up going in a complete circle, ending up back outside the rental car office just 400 metres into our rental! The GPS was preset to French and I worked on finding the language settings while Nik set off for a second attempt... we though we knew where we'd gone wrong. This time
we did another 400 metre loop, ending up in a taxi only area pretty much next to where we'd started. We were in stitches... I was laughing so much I had tears rolling down my face. Finally - on the third attempt we got out of the airport and on the road for the 350km trip to Nantes.
Our hotel was just inside the ring road that surrounds Nantes, maybe 5 kilometres or so to the centre of town. We checked in and decided to head into town to get some lunch. We decided on trying the local burger joint and had some fairly good burgers and fries. Nantes seemed to be a fairly large city with not a heck of a lot going for it from a tourist point of view but we weren't there strictly as tourists.
Hellfest is an annual three day festival held in the tiny village of Clisson, around 20 miles from Nantes. The first day was already well under way while we were on the road from Paris but we planned to be at the venue by 1700 to see Therapy? and several bands of the main stages. Elin dropped Nik, Jo
and I off about a kilometres walk from the venue - as close as we could get - and we walked through a sea of tents and flags to the main gates of Hellfest. Getting in was no issue but it took us a good 30 minutes to get our bearings and get a beer, by which time Therapy? were just about finished. The organisers were using a token system for the purchase of alcohol - one token = one Euro. As a result, we thought we had to queue twice and Jo kindly volunteered to join the queue for tokens while Nik and I figured out the lay of the land. Fortunately we found a near empty "Bank" and managed to get our tokens before Jo had even moved an inch in her queue.
Trivium were up next and I watched from the back of the crowd on Main Stage 2 before locating the merchandise tent off to the right of Main Stage 1. I bought a few Iron Maiden shirts and a Sepultura one also. The location of the tent was not too bad to view part of Rob Zombie's set so we stayed there for 30
minutes or so. I then wandered back to Main Stage 2 to see Sepultura from the 4th row, leaving just before the end of the set to again catch Nik by the merch tent for Iron Maiden. 120,000 fans went crazy as Bruce Dickinson and the band hit the stage for a two hour set pulling heavily from Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and Fear of the Dark. It was a hell of a night.
Elin collected us at 1130 (we missed Slayer due to being too old for a festival) and we were back at the hotel, shattered but happy, just after midnight.
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