Summer Sundae Weekender

We did the Summer Sundae weekender again this year. We left on Thursday night and got back around 16:00 on Monday having had approximately 5 minutes of sleep during that time. Well okay it was probably a bit more than 5 minutes, but it certainly wasn't as much as I really needed. I'm utterly exhausted now.

We took a £10 tent from Lidl. The first night we got there we got shown to where we were to set up our tent. The security bloke who had shown us there asked "will this be enough space?" to which I replied "I dunno, I've never put the tent up before. It's only a 2-man tent so it should be fine." He hung around a while to make sure it was okay.

Now being a man I can't simply take the tent out of its bag and unfold it. NO! It has to be taken out, placed on the floor while still rolled and, with one smooth motion, held with one hand and unrolled at speed with the other. The tent will unroll its length and the person doing the unrolling will look very cool. Or so I thought.

I stood there, confidently holding it with one hand and, with one smooth movement unrolled it across the floor with the other. But it didn't unroll over a distance as expected. No, it stopped at about the size of a single airbed matress, its garish blue and yellow colours shining back at us even in the dusky light. "Holy SHIT it's small" were the words I used, if I remember correctly. You know that phrase "you get what you pay for"? Well I'd paid for £10 of tent and I'd got £10 of tent.

It took some time to put it up properly too, as the instructions left rather a lot to be desired. One end of the tent was designed to be simply propped up with a single stick which, unsurprisingly, didn't stay in place for very long. There was barely space for both sleeping bags inside, and we had to push the bags down to the bottom as there was nowhere to keep them other than inside the tent. As far as I can tell it didn't rain that night, but the tent was wet in the morning (presumably from dew) and because it was impossible not to to touch the sides while inside the tent, most of what was outside the tent ended up inside. Plus the stupid prop thing had fallen over and so the ends of the tent were on the sleeping bags.

In the end we borrowed Ricey's 3-man tent which proved to be rather a lot drier and just a tad more spacious. We kept the bags etc inside even though there was storage space for the bags at the ends of the tent and there was still tonnes more space.

Anyway this is the first time I've been camping in years and I've really missed it. It's put me in the mood for some serious camping, but we'll need a new tent first. This looks quite good, and I can get an additional 20% off bringing the total down to £78.39 (or £39.20 each). Bargain.

The festival itself wasn't as good this year as the two previous years in my opinion. The Delays were good, and The Proclaimers were quite good (although I slept through most of their gig as it was very warm and dry and I was very cold and tired). Other than that we spent most of our time in the new Cabaret tent which was all comedy acts. Plus they've made the festival bigger and sold more tickets and so has lost a lot of the charm it had in previous years.

I'm not saying it was shit, just not as good as it has been in the past.

Camping at the festival was a nice experience too. We may very well do that all the time in the future. The only down-sides are the parking and the drunk twats coming back from the festival sitting around shouting all night. Having to regularly feed money into the parking machine is a right royal pain in the bum and getting no sleep is bloody annoying.

Anyway that's enough about that. I suspect I'm not going to have happy news tonight as Zippy (our one remaining mouse) is going to the vets and I suspect they're going to tell us that the only kind thing to do now is put him to sleep. So as you can imagine I'm in a wonderful mood today.