Road to Bilbao BBK

As Tony Wilson says in the movie 24 Hour Party People (quoting somebody else) - 'the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom'. Our road to festival excess was leading us to BBK Live in Bilbao, Spain. In order to get there, we had to get off the plane from Copenhagen, drive up to Grimsby and collect our tickets to the festival. As we landed at Heathrow a bit late due to weather difficulties, we only drove about halfway up the motorway before we needed to have some rest. We set off in the morning to arrive at Aunty Anne's early afternoon where we had a much needed clean up and cups of tea action. We ended up staying the night as the weather didn't look to flash on the forecast (thanks Aunty Anne!) and we set off reasonably early the next morning, Wednesday the 8th of July. We drove from Grimsby to Dover, then took the ferry to Calais, after which we made it to Rouen before we had a snooze at a park already full of long haul trucks and their sleeping drivers. Setting off the next morning, we had about 850 kilometres to cover to make it to Bilbao as the festival kicked off that night. It was a long day's drive and when we made it to Bilbao it became apparent that we didn't have the first clue about where the festival site was. After we had pulled into a servo to try and get some directions, we met a couple in a similar predicament. They had been to the campsite but had been turned away in their campervan (a very similar model to ours) and told to park somewhere else. They couldn't find the location of the carpark suggested to them as an alternative as their GPS had died. We were all set to lead Anton & Kim to the site (our GPS is fine) when (after a fair bit of diagnosis and battery charging - thanks Anton!) we discovered that our starter motor had died. After a push start, we were on our way and we found the carpark - a large free area where quite a few campers had already set up. With our long drive and then the drama of the breakdown we were both pretty tired at this point but we dragged ourselves out of the van to head up to the first night's action at BBK. We walked about 25 minutes from the van, uphill to a city bus station. We eventually found the festival shuttle bus about a block away from the bus terminal (more signs were needed). A quick trip into the hills, followed by another 25 minute walk and we'd made it to the festival site, very tired but pleased we'd made it in time to hear a some of Depeche Mode's set. Sadly we had missed the Ting Tings and Editors but due to van circumstance it couldn't be helped. Depeche were in good form, they played around with some of the arrangements on some songs so that came across well. Dave Gahan seemed to be suspiciously active in encouraging the crowd to wave or clap along, at times it looked a touch 'jazzercise'. Thankfully it didn't detract to much from the performance as a whole. Next up was Basement Jaxx, but as we were falling in a heap by this stage we headed back to the van and got into bed about 2am (I think).