It's been three years since I was last at the Download Festival, and as history tends to repeat itself, the past five days were spent up north at Donington Park for this year's Download Festival. We left on Thursday afternoon, taking eight of us up there in cars, and arrived at the festival campsite around 5pm before setting up camp.

It was good to have a decent sized campsite this year, and the bonus of having cars with us allowed us to get food to cook as well as fairly cheap cold beers for the weekend, instead of your usual warm flat festival beer. Thursday evening was just spent around the festival and campsite, with not too much going on other than the masses of people arriving as well as plenty of activity in the 'village' with the fairground and bars around.

The bands started on Friday - with the highlights being Them Crooked Vultures and of course AC/DC, who were awesome, despite their egos being of a similar size to their stage, which they purposely built for this once off gig. Strange, but still wicked to see them live. The highlight of the weekend were Saturday's band - firstly was Hellyeah and then later in the day - Deftones followed by Rage Against The Machine, who simply were amazing, even having just seen them a week ago.

Yesterday started off again with amazingly hot weather, as had the other two and a bit days done - and we made our way to the arena to catch the highlights of the day, namely Slash, Motörhead, Stone Temple Pilots and Stone Sour. The rain decided to make an appearance late afternoon a bit before STP hit the stage, which dampered (excuse the pun) their performance somewhat - but were still wicked to see live.

Aerosmith were on the main stage to bring Download to an end last night, but after watching Stone Sour in the rain, we game them a miss and headed back to camp. Today was just an easy day, getting up fairly early, packing and heading back down to London, in desperate need of a shower and general clean after five hot, dusty (and muddy) days at a festival. But in general - a brilliant festival with a good bunch of people.