Heineken Jammin and the Hurricane!!

Ok, so the reason we travelled from Florence to Rome, down to Naples and then all the way back up to Venice before heading back down to Bari to catch a ferry over to greece was to go to the Heineken Jammin Festival. A music festival over 4 days. We decided to treat ourselves to 2 of the 4 days, during which we would see the likes of, My Chemical Romance, The Killers, Linkin Park, PEARL JAM!, Incubus, Smashing Pumpkins and Aerosmith. What a line up!

The day started well...nice and sunny...

Sean was in heaven, so much Heineken and so few hours to drink it all!

The venue was Parco San Giuliano, whic was a huge area with two stages and plenty of recreational areas along with room for camping. The day started with three Italian bands, which were good, but singing in Italian. Just before My Chemical Romance started it started raining. We had no raincoats.

Then it started pouring.

We borrowed a tiny umbrella.

Then Sean says 'I think I just got hit by some hail'. The hail starts the size of peas, then quickly turns into 50c pieces and let me tell you all, that size hail does not tickle!

The wind picked up and we all started running for cover. We hide behind one of the huge sound towers, and then look up to see that four similar towers have been blown over by the wind!

We move back into the open, but then just as quickly as it all started the storm/hurricane passed and the sun came back out.

You can see, everyone, even those that did have raincoats were drenched!

Here is one of the towers that came down, and people were actually crushed beneath them. it was so awful. More than 10 people were taken to hospital, some in critical condition, though in the end everyone was ok. Luckily.

Because the speakers and all the cables had been ripped up when the towers went over the event organiser couldnt make any announcements. It was a mass of confusion.
We were all shuffled out by riot police and the entire weekend was cancelled. We were very disappointed, but lucky not to have been hurt. We found out the next day that the whole main stage had been pushed 1.5m by the winds!