Monday comes around far too quickly at Lowlands, and with it the prospect of packing your current world into a cumbersome rucksack and of even more of the Lowlands’ national pastime, standing in line.
Last year we were one of the last to leave our field and it’s quite sickening to see the stuff that’s left behind. Gazebos, tents, tarpaulin, bags of food, bags of garbage, more gazebos. It’s like the refugee camp had to suddenly move on. We even left our 17 Euro gazebo behind, because it soon emerges 17 Euro doesn’t buy you a gazebo that will last more than one weekend. But I took my tent and tarpaulin, despite the fact the former did leak slightly during the rain, but then it’s always done that.
We trudged back to the car, pausing only for an hour to queue for coffee, and then a further 20 minutes for a bottleneck. After the latter, we wandered past the queue for the busses. It went on and on and on. Once again we praised the idea of going by car this year.
The line out of the car park fed slowly, but at least it moved (which it doesn’t always), and actually the journey back was much quicker than expected.
About a week later, I opened up my tarpaulin to lose the dried dirt, etc and found that we had brought back an unexpected souvenir of the weekend. Tucked inside was a little toadlet who had tried to make a bid for safety from the mud and oppressive greenery of Biddinghuizen. He looked fine despite having been folded in tarpaulin for several days, but refused to move. I called him Iggy Frog in the hope he was just waiting for a name to move, but it didn’t seem to help. I left him in a dark corner of the balcony, near some water. He still didn’t move, but I assume he was alive because he was Iggy Frog and therefore indestructible. In fact he was probably happily humming to himself such Iggy Frog hits as “I Wanna Be Your Frog,” “I Am Phibian” and “I Wanna Be Your Frog.”