Blueprint festival 2009.

Two weeks ago the boyfriend and I went to the Blueprint music festival, held near Ararat, here in Victoria. The weather was pretty crap, and it was pretty cold...and everything was running late...but we had a great time anyway!

Day one was spent travelling to the venue, about three hours out of Melbourne, and after finally finding it (the venue was WAY out in the country, down a dirt road) the boyfriend set about putting up our tent. I supervised, after all my hard work finding our awesome tent site!

After we had erected our new home, we made a batch of choc chip pancakes and watched others set up theirs. It was lovely and sunny , but we were being lulled into a false sense of security...

This is the view from our campsite, towards the stages and stalls. The festival was held in a natural amphitheatre, a basin formed by a volcano, a long time ago .

Looking out over part of the tent city

Pretty sunset pictures...

See all the yellow paddocks? The farms in this area had huge areas of land covered in rape (I have no idea why it is called that), so that it was a lush yellow carpet as far as the eye could see.

This is where the story gets more interesting. TECHNICALLY we weren't allowed to bring alcohol into the festival...we were supposed to buy it there. But everything was running way behind, and by 7pm there was STILL no music or beer tent. So...we jumped in the car and drove the single lane road into the nearest town and got two bottles of Bourbon. Then we hid them in the spare tire well, and drove back to the festival.
As you can tell by these two pictures, we made short work of the booze, and had ourselves a swell old time. Which included doing an impromptu photo shoot before we passed out in our tent...the boyfriend won't let me show you his pictures!

Next morning we crawled out of our tent to find chaos. At least every 4th tent had blown down over night due to the strong winds, and it was raining. Our tent, thankfully, was undamaged mostly due to the boyfriends superior tent-erecting skills. As it was way too windy to light our wee gas stove we decided to leave the festival again and find a decent place for breakfast.

And we did! After our AMAZING breakfast at The Vines in Ararat we felt ready to face the day.
And less hungover.

The bulk of the day was spent tripping around the small towns in the area.

This is what I was wearing under my cosy jacket, a silk top and my Tasmania necklace.

After tripping through the small towns we explored parts of the Grampians national park.
Being the simple New Zealanders we are, the sight of kangaroos and flocks of cockatoos still causes us to shriek with glee...

And took some cool pictures from a viewing platform.

Late in the afternoon we returned to the festival, to find that the music for the day had only just started, so we hadn't missed anything! Note the study rocks on out tent pegs? Wind protection.

It was too cold to do anything but get drunk, which we proceeded to do with great enthusiasm.
Hence the colourful "moving lights" picture above.

Day three dawned with even worse weather. So after a hasty breakfast we packed up the tent and hightailed it home, to a much needed shower and decent meal!
....
I had planned to wear a pile of cute dresses at the festival, and in fact only took cute dresses with me, only adding my coat, jeans and some tops at the last minute. I had also planned to take lots of outfit shots. The weather destroyed all those plans...

No drink driving occured on this trip...we checked!