Our third day at PartySan was good but not particularly blog-inspiring. We went back into town, back to the little restaurant and this time got the schnitzel meals we had seen being served the day before. We charged all our chargeables, got a couple of things from the supermarket and went back to camp with very full stomachs.
Courts went and showered and I promptly fell asleep, which is how he left me when he went searching for friends to drink with. The previous day he had bought a dozen beers and completely forgotten he couldn’t take glass into the campgrounds. Luckily he had also bought a massive 5 litre bottle of water so he emptied it out and filled it with beer, which almost filled the bottle. So there he is walking around camp with this ridiculously huge bottle of beer – he doesn’t do things by halves!
Courts looked for his friend from home in the vague direction of where she said her tent was but couldn’t find her. He went to a camp where there was a New Zealand flag amongst others but the Kiwi wasn’t home and the others weren’t particularly welcoming. And so it is that he found himself asking a German group if they had seen any other Kiwi flags and not really leaving their camp. Well, he did for a minute, until one ran after him to ask if he was really from New Zealand and before you know it he’s sharing his massive beer bottle and having a good old time.
Meanwhile, I had woken up and was packing what I could in preparation for an early start the next day. Courts had said he would be in the festival grounds at a particular time and so knowing him and his timekeeping habits I headed into the grounds an hour after said time. I did a loop of the field which is small enough that every other time we’ve used this method of searching for each other it’s worked. It doesn’t work if the person you’re searching for is still at the other end of the run way, which is where Courts was still happily socializing. I watched Hail of Bullets from Courtney’s favourite spot to the right of the stage figuring if he was off getting beer or at the toilet, he’d come back to this point.
After half an hour (and some very cool pyrotechnics) I got bored and did another loop to no avail and so decided to hunt for these Kiwi camps myself. I walked the entire length of the camp looking and listening for any sign of a loud long haired boy and then looped back at the end of the run way and started for camp. I figured if he wasn’t there, I’d go back into the festival for dinner and then go to bed – after all it was closing in on 10pm by this time.
Courts wasn’t at the tent but his almost empty beer bottle was so I figured he was inside. As I walked towards the entrance, he walked towards me, having been looking for me for an hour or so. Turns out as I walked forward through the Hail of Bullets crowd to do my second loop of the field. He had pretty much walked up to take my place in the crowd, where he stood to watch the end of Hail of Bullets. We missed each other by minutes if not seconds and so when Hail of Bullets had finished he had done a loop of his own and then gone back towards the tent, which is when we found each other.
We watched Watain’s set - which featured a very cool stage filled with burning goblets and tridents – ate our last festival dinner and then went back to the tent. Courts left again at one point to watch Enslaved but gave up on At The Gates when the set was over 45 minutes late and it started pouring with rain. So we slept, again to the sound of rain drowning out the last of the music.
