Good:
- Saw some familiar faces, although lack of a forum meet and/or worthwhile bands to watch on the Mainstage (meaning I rarely visited the Rock Soc tent) meant I didn't see everyone I was hoping to
- Good weather (albeit too hot at times)
- Didn't get sunburnt at all
- Came well prepared so I didn't need to waste money on festival food
- Managed to pitch my tent sufficiently far away from any chainsaw snorers, so I actually managed to get some decent sleep
Bad:
- No mead for sale
again. "We have beer and cider though", great, so if I want to drink cat piss or rotting apples, I know where to ask.
- BGC not doing a Dundee pickup this year ("it's hard to find buses in Dundee"), so my journey down stared at 1am on Thursday, and I didn't arrive until 2:30pm.
- Got the BGC from Edinburgh instead, but the coach ended up going to Glasgow anyway, where there was a direct coach to Bloodstock (ours went to Carlisle after Glasgow) so I may as well have booked the coach from there. Would've saved at least two hours on the return trip alone.
- Already mentioned by others, but this was the worst lineup at a Bloodstock, ever. Unless there was a really good band I wanted to watch (far and few between...), there was very little incentive to leave the shaded areas of the campsite. Headliners were overrated, surprise band was meh, decent bands started late and finished early. *shrug*
- Next years lineup already looks like a trainwreck. Genuinely wondering if there's any point continuing attending Bloodstock any more, or if I should find a new festival to call home.
Ugly:
- Queuing to get in for 90+ minutes. I predicted it'd be bad, what with the move to e-tickets, but in that heat with no cover for so long? It's getting dangerous. Considering there was no actual bag check (dunno if they gave up doing checks after a certain point), I have no idea why it took so long to get in.
- Only the same two water points in the arena. I had access to the campsites (not that the Midgard taps near me had any pressure), so I made tactical retreats when the heat got too much. Day ticket holders either queued for ages (in the sun) or paid extortionate amounts to rehydrate. Again, dangerous.
- The state of the bins after the jousting. What happened to the bin containers from last year that prevented this happening? Apparently security weren't interested in stopping it, and Bloodstock have stopped trying to prevent it, so maybe we just need to learn to live with idiots trying to break their necks at 2am...
"I don't always go to clubs... but when I do, I enter through the ladies room"
~ Adam Jenson