When I heard that Pearl Jam were playing at the Hard Rock Calling festival, I immediately bought tickets without caring much for the rest of the line up. To be fair, the other bands we saw put on a great show – Expatriate (who I suspect was Stacey’s favourite), Gaslight Anthem (who I’d never heard of but was well impressed with), The Hives (who replaced Wolfmother after they pulled out due to sickness) and Ben Harper (Mr Charismatic). But for me, it was always about seeing Pearl Jam!

I was quite impressed with their set list, which I felt was a great mix of older and newer songs. Most impressively, they played for over two hours, which is huge for a festival. We started off the show somewhere in the middle of the crowd, until Aubain, Wes and I tried to bury ourselves in a bit deeper. We managed to make it maybe 30 metres further in, but the wall of people eventually became too difficult to penetrate, so we settled in and enjoyed the rest of the show. Yes, the days of fighting the crowds to get to the front are well and truly over, but I’m ok with that!

Given that Ben Harper had played right before Pearl Jam, I was somewhat expecting a guest appearance during PJ’s set. And, given that Eddie had come out to perform a cover of Under Pressure with Ben Harper during his set, I was even more confident that the favour would be return. And I wasn’t disappointed! Ben Harper waltzed onto the stage to join the band in playing Red Mosquito – and if there was ever a Pearl Jam song made for Ben Harper’s slide guitar, this has got to be it!

Anyway – here’s a short video of two panoramas from within the crowd (from our first spot and then our second). There’s an outside chance that it includes some awesome singing on my part, too.

View the Hard Rock Calling photo album on Picasa.

As you may remember, we spent our Easter long weekend with Racey and Wes in The Lake District. As usual, we took a decent chunk of video footage, and I finally had a chance on the weekend to put it all together.

I have to say upfront, this is not my best video ever. The footage was all a bit choppy and random. Actually, there was a fault with the camera, and this was the last time we used it before sending it in to get fixed. So hopefully the next video is a bit more cohesive.

Still, it is what it is, and it brings back some memories. Enjoy!

Music
Biffy Clyro – Mountains
The Goo Goo Dolls – Give a Little Bit

Here’s a little video that I made of our walk on Sunday. I used YouTube Vimeo for the transport mechanism because it’s pretty big (around 180 MB), and YouTube Vimeo does the whole high-def thing very well. Enjoy!

Music:
Scouting For Girls – Keep on Walking
Alter Bridge – Down to my last

There’s a pond down at Chiswick Park which is home to a number of ducks. With all the freezing temperatures we’ve been having lately, the pond has frozen over in parts – sad for the ducks, but happy for us, as it provides minutes of entertainment, watching the ducks scramble for bread on the ice. We headed down with Julian and Shelley to have a laugh at nature’s expense.

Time – 1:15, Size: 8.9 MB

Cruel? Maybe – but they are getting food out of it, and not just any food either, a lot of rather nice whole-wheat pita bread that we didn’t eat soon enough.

Update: Now with working video!

Kristy and I went and checked out Gunnersbury Park, which we’ve been to before and loved. Now that it’s Autumn (or do they call it “Fall” here?), all the leaves have changed colour and fallen off the trees, which makes for some excellent playtime – especially in the wind!

Time – 1:04, Size: 7.31 MB

We also decided to check out if there were any caches in the park, and there’s heaps! We found The Wall, Potomac Pond, and The Boating lake. My favourite of these was The Wall, because of the way it was very cleverly hidden behind a brick in a hole in the bottom of… a wall.

We had set out to simply have a bit of a wander, but ended up staying for about two hours. Gunnersbury Park is definitely one of our favourites, and now that it’s just around the corner, I think we’ll be visiting it more often!

Last weekend, Kristy and I joined Nick and Suzie down in The New Forest for some mountain biking fun. Well, for Kristy, it was for some R’n'R fun, but Nick, Suzie and I did our best to tear up the terrain! And what an awesome time we had! The New Forest is extremely well suited to mountain biking, with heaps of scenic paths through the woods. In fact, if you follow Nick and Suzie’s lead, everything becomes a path through the woods, so there really is no limit to the places you can go!

Don’t believe me? Check the video! As usual with extreme(ish) sports, they eventually (d)evolve into The Nick Show, but lets be honest, he is by far the most entertaining one of us .

Time – 3:30, Size: 24.70 MB

Star of Shannon trained down from London to join us for dinner at The Glasshouse – a spectacular pub in the town where we were staying, Lyndhurst. It was amazing! We all walked out thoroughly full!

The New Forest seemed like a perfect place for geocaching, and sure enough there’s quite a few down there to be found! So Kristy, Shan and I went for a bit of a hunt on Sunday morning after breakfast. We farewelled our travelling monkey at Ben’s Ramble, our first find of the day (and a tricky one to find it was!). However, it seems we weren’t to be without a trackable for too long, as we picked up a Travelling 2c Coin at our very next stop! The adventure continues!

And, despite how much fun Shannon made of the two of us, I think secretly, she was loving it!

Clearly I was getting tired towards the end of the maze, as the footage at the start seems to be much smoother than the footage at the end.

Anyway, here’s a short video of our trip through Longleat maze, including some very tricky (and I mean it was tricky!) backwards maze walking. Enjoy!

Time – 1:58, Size: 13.19 MB

As mentioned, we spent our long weekend in Wales, just taking it easy and enjoying a slower pace of life.

Sadly, my D-SLR is playing up at the moment (well actually I suspect it’s the lens), so we didn’t get as many photos as we normally would; lucky we got some video instead!

Time – 4:42, Size: 31.49 MB

After having quite a run-around to get tickets for Pearl Jam, I was especially looking forward to their concert at the O2 Arena, and on Tuesday, all our waiting finally paid off!

My only worry was that the tickets I had bought off eBay would be fake and they wouldn’t let me in – but thankfully, this was not the case! In fact, it was quite the opposite – the tickets were actually pretty good!

Gomez – another band who Kristy and I are both very fond of – were the opening act, so really for us it was two concerts in one. They played a short set consisting mainly of songs from their latest album, and also a few old favourites such as Silence, and How We Operate.

Pearl Jam came on around 8:45 PM to a momentous applause, opening with their classic song Release. They played a two-and-a-half hour set, consisting mainly of songs from their older albums, quite a few B-Sides, plus a few previews from their upcoming album Backspacer.

The show was simply brilliant! The highlights for me were Alive, Footsteps, Yellow Ledbetter, and by far the best version of Crazy Mary that I’ve ever heard.

I managed to record a bit of the show on my camera, and was surprised by how decent the quality was. Check it out:

Time – 3:16, Size: 22.1 MB

Full set-list

Release, Animal, Corduroy, Why Go, Eldery Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town, Immortality, The Fixer, Even Flow, I Got ID, Rats, Got Some, Whipping, Light Years, Insignificance, Black, Life Wasted, Blood

Encore 1: Supersonic, Hail Hail, Footsteps, Love Reign O’er Me, Do The Evolution, Alive

Encore 2: Better Man, Crazy Mary, Leaving Here, Porch, Yellow Ledbetter

Time – 3:12, Size: 22 MB

Most people wouldn’t have believed that young Nick would ever make it to 30, but on Friday he proved the critics wrong and celebrated in style!

His super-duper uber-organised girlfriend – Suzie – arranged for a gaggle of his friends to stay with him at a beautiful old house (built in the 1500′s!) in Bedfordshire. It was massive!

It was easily the coolest house I’ve ever stayed in! There were lots of crooked hallways, winding stair-cases, rooms with views, and extremely low ceilings – people in the fifteen hundreds must have been very short. It’s a good thing no-one bumped their head too hard, otherwise there could have been some terrible injuries!

Everything required for an awesome weekend was there – great company, and loads of food and drinks. The meal highlight was definitely Saturday night, for which Suzie had organised a massive BBQ of marinated chicken, burgers, sausages, corn, veggies, bread, and salads. Being the only Aussie in the group, I proudly stepped up for the position of of tong-master.

One of Nick’s friends – Ray – had brought along a bunch of sky lanterns, which are basically mini hot-air balloons. The idea is that you write messages on them, light the fuse, then send them off on their merry quest for the heavens. This seemed like a fantastic idea – and it was – however, a few of the balloons didn’t have the greatest of starts, and got caught up in the trees around the house. Depending on who you ask, this was either “unfortunate”, or “it almost burned the house down”. I’m more on the former side, but I’m glad that we managed to escape without incident!

Overall a fantastic weekend away, and also a lovely test for our new car which drove four of us there, and five of us back, effortlessly!