Camping can be a lot of fun, especially if done at a festival, to take full advantage of all that there’s to do and see. However, if you do not prepare well enough, the experience will just be a miserable and awkward one! Here are 8 tips for camping at festivals so you can avoid this!
Remember to pack all the essentials
There’s a lot to cover here since the list of ‘essentials’ is pretty long when you plan to spend a few days living out of a tent. Here are the essential items you need to acquire for your next festival:
- Enough clothing to last through the festival
- Some basic medicine. Such as cold medicine and allergy meds, and a first aid kit.
- A reusable and durable water bottle.
- Sun cream, insect repellents, and other such items to deal with the environment.
- Plastic plates, cutlery, and cups.
- Light rainwear (for the unpredictable Irish weather!)
Mark out your camping spot
One of the most valuable tips for camping at festivals is always to have a way to mark your camping spot or tent. You may not be able to picture it without prior experience. However, when it comes time to camp during a festival, the entire area will be flooded with tents. And a surprising number of tents are utterly identical at such gatherings. This makes it exceedingly difficult to properly navigate through the area and find your tent if you hadn’t left one of your friends there to wait for you and wave. So, get creative! You can buy small coloured flags, put up some kind of a sign, or anything else that comes to mind. So long as it allows you to find your way back and people don’t feel tempted to steal it, it’s fine.
Plan out your meals
Of course, festivals typically mean lots of food stalls with fast food and similar. However, ask yourself this: do you want to eat nothing but unhealthy, probably greasy food for the entire duration of your festival camping trip? Oh, sure, it will be novel and exciting at first. But we guarantee that you will get sick of it surprisingly quickly. Now, there are not really a lot of options for the food you can bring along and prepare yourself under these conditions. But you can bring a mini cooler and a gas stove if the local rules allow it. Just be extra, extra careful when handling them!
Double-check the camping rules
Speaking of camping rules, you must update yourself on them. Some camping sites, especially during festivals and the like, have very strict policies on what can and can’t be done. Following our previous suggestion would be fine for some. In others, you could get flagged for violating safety rules and may even be asked to leave the festival grounds altogether. To avoid senselessly getting into trouble, you should know what you can do and when you can do it! This way, you can ensure that you and everyone around you can have fun positively and safely.
Bring along things to help you sleep
Among the common camping fears, not much applies to camping at a festival. After all, everyone’s together, and the setting is typically quite urban. Concerns over being able to sleep, however, are only aggravated. Even if everyone is on their absolute best behaviour, having so many people crammed together with nothing but thin fabric walls to separate them makes for a loud occasion. You may be stuck near a loud snorer if you are unlucky. Or your neighbours might be less than kind and blasting music the entire night. So, bring earplugs, a sleep mask, and everything else you may use to make your nights more bearable. That way, you’ll be well rested and ready to enjoy the festival entirely.
Look into security locker availability
Typically, when a camping festival is organized, access to security lockers are also secured. Not many people would feel comfortable leaving their valuables in an unguarded tent. And just lugging all your belongings with you is not conducive to having a fun time at a festival. However, compared to the number of people interested in festival camping, the number of lockers is minimal. Therefore, one of our tips for camping at festivals is that you need to call well ahead of the festival itself and have a locker reserved for your use. Or simply try and leave anything valuable at home!
Think about personal hygiene
No one likes to think about the less pleasant sides of camping. The lack of easy access to facilities that let you take care of personal hygiene does need to be addressed, though. So, on top of our previous list and having to pack your camping gear in a way you can safely bring it with you, you also need to bring along many hygiene products. Wet wipes are an excellent inclusion. Also, you will need to play an exciting balancing game when picking your camping spot. Obviously, you will want to be somewhere relatively close to a portable toilet typically used during such events. However, the smells will quickly get overwhelmingly bad if you are too close to it. The same goes for bins you can use for your rubbish.
Be respectful
Finally, the most crucial tip for camping at festivals is always to be respectful of fellow campers. All it takes is a single bad ‘neighbour’ to make everyone in a several-meter radius regret showing up for the event. And while camping can definitely improve your mental wellbeing, running into such rudeness can only ruin it instead. Just follow the simple, age-old rule: do not do to others something you wouldn’t want to be done to yourself. So, imagine how you’d feel seeing your camping neighbour do something before you make people uncomfortable!
Final word
With our 8 tips for camping at festivals under your belt, you can avoid the most uncomfortable situations. Just remember: if there’s a problem with your camping neighbour, you can always try to move! There is no need to clash.