“You’re Insane”

Splendour in the Grass July 2011

My friend recently told me this in response to some actions I took. I was rather pleased with myself as they had paid off. Here is the story, would you have called me insane?

Splendour In the Grass (SITG) is a well known Australian music festival. It gets bigger and bigger (and more expensive) with each passing year, and tickets become harder to come by… usually (more on that later). It is however held in the state of Queensland, and I currently reside in Victoria. So the cost of a ticket ($500+), plane flights and then usual festival expenses would have meant a total bill of easily $1000, way outside my pitiful budget. Some when I discovered that SITG was holding a Twitter Hunt competition again this year I, obviously, eagerly awaited the day. A Twitter Hunt works like so: tickets are hidden somewhere in a designated city and Tweets holding clues are given out. Usually I’m woeful at these sort of things, but for once, it seemed to be favouring me…

And so the ‘insanity’ begins. My friend, the one who called me insane, has recently been out of work, so I told her she should do it, unfortunately she is also soon to be homeless so was looking at rental properties. I was at work, just a little north of the city. SITG gave a clue early, before the tickets were hidden suggesting “you may need a raincoat… or even your gumboots”. Hmm… well, we are in the garden state.. wonder were they could possibly be hiding…

First clue: “We are hiding in this deceptively named place that you would expect to find a few blocks north of here”

Second clue: “Just to the east of where you expect to find ‘treasure’ “

It was at this point that I text my friend telling her where they were! But I am stuck at work, or am I? My boss has just popped off for a two hour meeting, it was 11.45 and therefore kind of lunch time, would they notice if I disappeared? Probably not, but how to get there?! Public transport would take forever, so I made a deal with myself. I would walk around the corner and if a taxi showed up, it was fate and I HAD to get in… well what do you know, it was a taxi!

The taxi driver was very confused by my wanting to go to a park to hunt for tickets that may be found before I got there, but hey I gave him a $10 tip! I only had a $20 note and didn’t want to wait for the change…

En-route Clue 3 came through: “The Captain’s cottage looks good from here, but I wouldn’t pay to go inside today”

Yes! I was on the right track, now to find them! I go sprinting out of the taxi and then start to notice all the frantic people in work clothes with smart phones in their hands also running (damn hipsters). So I slowed down, figured they would already be found.. they were not! There was no sign of the tickets in the immediate vicinity of ‘the captains cottage’ but then clue four came along.

“Down hill from the frolicking dragon”

That was it, I knew exactly what they were talking about, had been there just a month previously! A quick run/walk around the cottage and I notice two suspicious looking people sitting on a bench, they don’t look like they belong. So I  run past a woman frantically looking under hedges and ask “Kind of a random question, but are you from Splendour?”
“YES!!! Congratulations!”  And just like that I’d won two event plus camping tickets to Australia’s biggest music festival, the first person in the country to get tickets!!!

Upon calling my friend to tell her we were off to Queensland, I am not only informed that she had just woken up, but that I was insane!! She was pretty happy though. So happy birthday AM hope you like the present!

Tickets for SITG went on sale three days later, they amazingly did not sell out… perhaps ticket prices have finally crept higher then the prestige of saying “I was at Splendour…”

N.F. xoxo