Archive for the ‘preparations’ Category

Full Metal Pastry Chef

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Camp cooking with Stu

Our Wacken com­pan­ion from last year, Mr Vagrant, likes to cook. He’s par­tic­u­larly good at desserts: from his kitchen we’ve enjoyed choco­late souf­flés, truf­fles at Christ­mas, giant oat and macadamia cook­ies, and a deli­cious choco­late semi­freddo, to name a few.

After a few drinks the other week­end we “cooked” up a deli­ciously devi­ous plan: appoint Vagrant the offi­cial 2010 tour muf­fin cook and demand camp­fire del­i­ca­cies in the field. The deed was done on Face­book shortly thereafter:

I’m appoint­ing you our offi­cial “Blitzkrieg Tour” Baker. You will be required to con­coct some kind of deli­cious treat using only camp­ground mate­ri­als dur­ing Wacken, Party.San or Sum­mer Breeze. Are you up to the challenge?

The response was favourable and the chal­lenge was accepted:

Aye aye, cap’n. Expect me to bake under the influ­ence. And prob­a­bly shout things like “AH CANAE DO EET CAP’N” and “NO COOKIE FOR j00!” at random.

The next log­i­cal step was an offi­cial uni­form piece. Mouths water­ing in antic­i­pa­tion, we found a chef’s hat and got it embroi­dered with “BLITZKRIEG TOUR PASTRY CHEF”, then popped it in a post bag an sent it off to Vagrant Inc’s offices:

Pastry Chef

We trust it will be bet­ter than “camp cook­ing with Stu”, pic­tured at the top of this post.

Today’s the day

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

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Tonight we fly out… excited? You bet!

Last week I got the fan­tas­tic news that Metal As Fuck has been Wacken-accredited which means I can go in the press areas. Ooooohh­hhh :) As well as being very very VERY fuck­ing cool for me, it’s great because the site has only been run­ning for a few months, yet already it’s get­ting recog­nised as a seri­ous, qual­ity source of metal news, reviews, inter­views and gen­eral what-have-yous (haha that rhymes). So it’s yay for me and con­grat­u­la­tions to Leti­cia and Foss and the rest of the MAF team, just for being awesome.

So now we “just” have to pack and then we’re off. Right after I fin­ish upload­ing this client site, answer a few more emails and make some notes for the peo­ple look­ing after our cats, house and business.

And look, I even cleaned and pol­ished my trusty doc martens, which will be my feet’s con­stant and faith­ful com­pan­ion for the next three weeks.

Where the hell am I?

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

The time is almost here to make the holy pil­grim­age to the beer soaked fields of old Deutsch­land. The pro­ce­dure is sim­ple… walk down to the field, find a good spot, pitch your tent, crack a beer and sit back.

Later that day you move your butt down to the stages, watch some bands and drink some more. You start stum­bling back to your tent… now where the hell was it? Ah wait, was it left at the rub­bish pile and right at the third passed out met­al­head, and across the sec­ond ditch? Or was that right at the pile, and across the sec­ond metalhead?

It may seem sim­ple, but put on your beer gog­gles, make it dark, and put up 65,000 tents and try again.

This small gad­get is awe­some – it’s a GPS loca­tor, allow­ing you store up to 3 places. Press a but­ton, and the arrow will point you in the right direc­tion, along with the dis­tance. No maps, no fancy fea­tures, just a “go this way” pointer and a bat­tery that lasts for ages. Too cool…

p2387_mainhttp://www.firebox.com/product/2387/ECCO-GPS-Keychain

PS: Don’t ask what is actu­ally in that ditch, chances are you will fall into it in the dark.

Coming to Wacken? Talk to us!

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

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While Charp has dropped off the tour again (sec­ond year run­ning… that boy is just unre­li­able) we have picked up a Vagrant and will be meet­ing up with sev­eral other peeps on and before the festival.

If any­one would like to catch up, we will have these Ger­man mobile num­bers when we land in Ham­burg on the 27th, so you can send us a text:

goat­lady kay: +49 1578 453 0334
met­al­beast dave: +49 1578 450 4479

The Ball­room, a metal club near the Fish­mar­ket area in Ham­burg, had a Wacken warm up party on the Mon­day night which is where we met Stu and Nicola who we ended up camp­ing with and a whole bunch of other awe­some peo­ple who we don’t really remem­ber much about (there was a lot of alco­hol con­sumed). We also met a bunch of Perth peo­ple which was quite amus­ing. They have a whole bunch of pre– and post-Wacken events planned and we will def­i­nitely be at one or all of them.

Look­ing for­ward to meet­ing some new metal peeps!

The countdown is on…

Friday, June 26th, 2009

As I write this, it’s 34 days until Wacken 2009 and 30 days until we leave for Europe.

We’re all organ­ised and ready to go!

Exhibit A: one tent. Note the queen size inflat­able mat­tress which fits inside said tent. We forked out a big $38 for this baby, and we have high hopes that it will be an improve­ment on last year’s dwelling which rather cramped our style.

Wacken Tent Test

Exhibit B: camp­ing choons:

image

Takes 2 bat­ter­ies and an SD card wth MP3s. Music at our camp­site, and all for $27.78 with free ship­ping. Bar­gain! It’s so small and light I’m a lit­tle con­cerned we’re gonna lose it in our bags.

I know we’ve been slack… more posts com­ing soon…

Festival camping – learning the hard way

Monday, December 29th, 2008

Um, that’s us there… in the blue tent, towards the left… [photo from offi­cial WOA Gallery]

We went and picked up a new tent in the post-Christmas sales, see­ing as we left our last one pitched in a field at Wacken along with a whole stack of other stuff that we fig­ured we would no longer be need­ing. We picked up some valu­able tent-related camp­ing tips last year, but not being expe­ri­enced campers – or in fact, campers at all — we unfor­tu­nately learned these the hard way.

  1. You may think, as we ini­tially did, that see­ing as you only get a cou­ple of hours sleep a night (if that), that a spa­cious and/or com­fort­able camp­ing arrange­ment is not impor­tant. On the con­trary. Because you are only get­ting a cou­ple of hours sleep a night, you want those cou­ple of hours to be as com­fort­able and rest­ful as pos­si­ble. If you spend your two pre­vi­ous hours of rest time squashed into a cor­ner won­der­ing what that lump is dig­ging into your ribs, you’re going to be very cranky when you finally do get up (at least you will if you’re me), in which case you might as well not have both­ered even attempt­ing to sleep. Metal karaoke goes until 6am and by 8am it’s far too hot to stay in the tent any­way, unless you’re unconscious.
  2. A two per­son tent is big enough for two (under­sized, per­haps dwar­ven) per­sons, but not big enough for two per­sons plus two per­sons’ worth of gear. Our new tent appar­ently sleeps three. Look­ing at the addi­tional space, I think they would have to be three VERY friendly per­sons, but we should be able to get me and Dave AND our packs in there a lit­tle easier.
  3. You don’t want your head to be in a vul­ner­a­ble posi­tion. We had a good camp­ing spot, nice and close to the grounds and facil­i­ties, but this meant that we had more foot traf­fic then we would have oth­er­wise. Stum­bling drunks + metal boots + your head on the ground near the edge + ten­dency for dudes to unzip and relieve them­selves any­where = recipe for dis­as­ter. This year, our tent is 220cmx200cm floor area (last years’ was 140cmx200cm). While the 220cm is meant to fit the three fic­tional per­sons across, we’ll be using to let Dave stretch his legs all the way out, which will hope­fully mean there’s less chance of his head get­ting stomped or uri­nated on. Which is A Good Thing.
  4. On day two it rained. Which meant every­thing turned to mud. Mud + boots + tent = more of a prob­lem then you would prob­a­bly realise. We needed our boots in the tent while we were sleep­ing so they didn’t get rained on, soaked with dew or uri­nated in (the most likely of the three). But because they were cov­ered in mud we had to put them in a plas­tic bag and try to keep them upright in the cor­ner or else every­thing else in the tent got cov­ered in mud too. It was a real pain, but any­way our new tent has a zip-up veran­dah (or at least you’d call it that if it wasn’t so laugh­ably, pathet­i­cally small). Which looks like a con­ve­nient place to take your boots off before you come “inside”. FTW!

Last year’s tent cost $29.95, thank you Ana­conda. This year we splashed out – with the 30% dis­count, it came to grand total of $38. That $8.05 had bet­ter be money well spent.

We have tickets, I repeat, we have tickets

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

At least, we think we do. We got con­fir­ma­tion emails but our credit card has not yet been charged… I’m sure it will be though, in due time.

Ticket sales are announced on the site now, but they weren’t when we got them – we were tipped off by a very excited Stu and then found them on the Met­altix site. Dave had to use BabelFish to trans­late the page to dou­ble check that he was buy­ing the right thing.

Not a sin­gle band has been announced yet, but Wacken 2009 here we come!

WOA 2009? Yes please!

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

At Wacken this year we met a lot of peo­ple who come to WOA every year. In fact, the oft-asked ques­tion when meet­ing some­one was likely to be “how many have you been to?”.

Orig­i­nally the plan had been that this would be a one-off trip. While stay­ing in Poland we realised we HAD to come back to visit again soon – the plan was then revised to 2010 (just enough time for the bud­get to recover). How­ever, since being back at home, it’s become increas­ingly obvi­ous that 2010 is not nearly soon enough. 2009 is the 20th anniver­sary and while no bands have been announced, a spe­cial lim­ited ini­tial allot­ment of tick­ets are already sold out.

This week­end, Dave and I made it con­crete: we’re going to WOA 2009. Sat­ur­day night, after a few drinks with Al, he con­firmed that he’s in.

So it’s offi­cial: let the count­down begin. WOA 2009, here we come!

Udo! At Wacken!

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

I’m pretty happy about this. Udo Dirkschnei­der, the crazy lit­tle man out the front of Ger­man power-metallers Accept and now U.D.O. is going to be doing a guest spot with Lordi at Wacken.

Just one song, mind you, but still… Udo is a bit of a leg­end as far as I’m con­cerned. Balls to the Wall rates as one of my all time favourite songs from my child­hood (I tried to slip it into the playlist at Gossy’s wed­ding, but the only 80’s power metal that made it past the DJ was Judas Priest’s Turbo Lover).

We’re a man down – Al will no longer be join­ing our epic jour­ney of epic­ness – but we’ll raise the horns for our fallen com­rades and bat­tle on, only 6 weeks til Wacken itself and a shade less than 4 weeks until we leave Aus­tralia. Wootage!

Contents of the “Full Metal Bag”

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

bag

The Wacken organ­is­ers have announced the con­tents of the “W:O:A Full Metal Bag 2008″. Well, actu­ally the posted a pic­ture of what’s in it. It looks to be some kind of show­bag that ticket-holders pick up when they get there.

From the pic­ture, it seems there is:

  • a “his­tory” card game (intriguing)
  • a sticker (always useful)
  • a patch (ditto)
  • a post­card (why not)
  • a pen (to write on the post­card, presumably)
  • a pon­cho (because we WILL be rained on at some point)
  • a trash bag (very handy)
  • a con­dom (many of which will no doubt be blown up and bat­ted around)

Plus “spe­cial gim­micks like CD’s and much more!”

Sounds awse. I’ve heard sto­ries of cer­tain other Euro­pean metal fes­ti­vals being not well run, but Wacken has a rep­u­ta­tion for mil­i­tary effi­ciency and pre­ci­sion so I’m expect­ing noth­ing less. They are Ger­man after all.