HELLFEST.
That really says it all. That's it. No more. Go home.
But never mind that - you want details, right? We woke up in our cramped hostel beds at roughly 08h00, quickly downed a breakfast of buttered bread with jam, and loaded up our bikes for the short haul to Clisson (making sure to get in the daily stretch on the Île de Nantes - we had originally wanted to head over to a park bearing the unfortunate acronym of CRAPA, but were effectively blocked by the massive construction sites that were blossoming across the island in time for summer.) We searched for a place to pick up lunch foodstuffs; however, this being Sunday, nearly everything was closed - we didn't find anything until about halfway to Clisson.
Although we lucked out with the canal path, French cycling routes (as you might have ascertained from our previous posts) rapidly decline in both quality and quantity once you leave the cities. So it was with the surroundings of Nantes; having left the city, we were left with little more than a terrible large-scale map of the entirety of France and equally terrible signs to find our way by. As a result, we quickly found ourselves squeezed against the side of the major ring highway, where a bevy of motorists angrily honked at us. (Not that we cared; we wanted to get off the highway as much as they wanted us off it, but were obviously unable to do so until we found an offramp pointing in a reasonable direction.) So that made for less than comfortable cycling.
Anyways, we did manage to fight our way down the main highway and find some backroads leading to Clisson. As we finally rolled into town, we were greeted by a sign indicating the direction to Hellfest parking; we had found the right place - but where was the music? We followed the signs, passing increasingly large concentrations of parked cars and - once we got a bit closer - groups of black-clad metalheads. No bike parking here; we had to chain our bikes to some vines in this field-vineyard-area that doubled as a parking lot, after which we set up our tent along the fringe of the vineyard sections. (As it turns out, this fringe was commonly used as a makeshift urinal by pretty much everyone who walked by, especially at night.)
With our gear finally unpacked and the tent set up for the night, we finally headed over to the main entrance. Since we hadn't managed to get a hold of Valkyrie's friend Piotr, we didn't have print copies of the tickets...but we had our laptop with JPEG versions of the tickets, which was enough to get in! We promptly headed over to the tents, where they were selling Hellfest-brand beer and wine (Seriously? Wine? At a rock/metal festival? (Although, to be fair, we did partake...and it was pretty decent, as the stuff was locally produced.))
Later on, we found our way over to the main stages, jostling our way through the gathering crowds in hopes of getting a decent spot to view the KISS show from. Quite a few people had set up entrenched positions further towards the stage, making it impossible to get to the front without resorting to extreme violence...but we did get far enough forward to be thoroughly impressed by the sensory extravaganza that is KISS. (Seriously - if you get the chance, go. KISS combines the best and worst of American rock-culture excess in one excessively makeup-covered tongue-fuelled spectacle.) They played a mix of classics and more recent songs from Sonic Boom, closing the show with profuse showers of confetti (check the pics!) followed by fireworks.
Well, we're heading on the road towards Bordeaux tomorrow - keep posted!