Two rad seniors escaped from a retirement home to go to the Wacken metal festival

It’s always alarming when elderly people go missing from a retirement home, since the outside world is particularly weird and scary these days, but sometimes—a very rare “sometimes”—a story about old people going missing can have a pretty rad ending. Such was the case over the weekend, when two unidentified men apparently escaped from their retirement home in Germany and traveled 25 miles to reach Wacken Open Air, the world’s biggest heavy metal festival.

According to German news site DW and a report from The Washington Post, the two men most likely got to Wacken by walking and using public transportation, and they weren’t found until 3 a.m. on Saturday morning after going missing on Friday night. They were also apparently “reluctant to leave” until they spoke with police, at which point they agreed to go home. According to a statement from police spokesperson Merle Neufeld, the two of them “obviously liked the metal festival” and wanted to stay.

Unfortunately, possibly out of respect for these two old dudes’ privacy, all of the more interesting details are going to have to be left up to our imagination until the eventual movie version of this story comes out. What kind of daring plan did they make to escape the retirement home guards? Did they have to fashion a rope out of bedsheets? What kind of adventures did they have along the way? Did they meet colorful characters? Did they somehow get backstage and meet various famous rock stars? These are the kind of things that need to be figured out before Gary Oldman signs on to star in Gray Metal. (That’s what we’re calling the spec script we’re currently writing. It’s a pun on “black metal,” since old people have gray hair, but we’ll let the studio come up with something better.)

 
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