Positivus AB mustic festival in Salacgrīva, Latvia

We park at the festival grounds, set up our tents, and have a few drinks before we head off for the music stages. Travis was REALLY good. I tried to introduce crowd surfing to Latvia. Unsuccessfully. Ouch. Either Latvia just isn't ready or I'm too fat. The next day we hung out at the beach and went for a swim and then saw a bunch of bands including Fatboy Slim and British Sea Power. The festival was really well run - only complaint was 7 port-o-potties for thousands of people. Shudder.

The next day my Estonian friends headed back to Tallinn and I found of group of Latvians who offered to drive me back to Riga. They needed someone to drive to town to pick up some food, but they were all drunk. I was sober (it was noon) so I offered to drive. I got in their van, but soon realized that it was a manual car (duh, I'm in Europe) so I explained I couldn't drive. No problem, they'll teach me! Yeah, right. Ok fine. After a few embarrassing stalls I'm off down to road to town. Every time my car stalled they explain to confused onlookers that they're teaching an American to drive stick and everyone had a pretty good laugh about it. We spend the rest of the day on the beach and take off just before a hurricane-like storm.

I get dropped off at Riga which is swarming with heavy metal fans who had just left the Metallica concert. I had really wanted to go but couldn't get back to Latvia in time. I make my way to my hostel and crash.