I woke up early and got myself ready before hitting the road to the camping field entrance. I didn’t really know what time it was supposed to open but I thought I’d ask when I got there.
It took the expected 20 minutes or so to get there and when I asked what time they were letting people in they said midday! Oh no, lots of time to kill, so I drove down the road and found a little lane to park in to have a spot of breakfast.
I was there maybe an hour or so before I thought I’d drive back to see what was going on, where I found the beginnings of a queue on the grass verge on the side of the road. Seeing that I headed up the road, found somewhere to turn around and parked up on the verge near the campsite entrance; sitting in the van there was no different to sitting in it somewhere else, and as everyone else was parking up why not do the same?
As you can expect, seeing people on the grass verge others decided they’d park on the road next to us, blocking the road – or making it very difficult for other drivers – but they were soon moved on.
Thankfully it was around 10:30am when they opened the gate and started to let people in, but as I went to bump down the kerb a cheeky chap pulling a beat up old caravan did a swift u-turn from the other side of the road and jumped in front of me…the bloody cheek of it! Ha! It didn’t really matter as it wasn’t long before I was on the field and heading to the bottom to be shown my pitch for the next few days.
After setting up, putting the new smaller awning up for only the second time (first time actually attaching it to the van) I grabbed a beer and said hi to my neighbours, and would you believe it, the cheeky chap who did the u-turn with the caravan was one of them – Alex – so we had a good laugh about that. Still bloody cheeky though!
I met all of his gang (took a while to get all their names, I’m soooooo bad at that!) and spent the afternoon chilling and having some drinks with Katie, Rich, Dylan, Tasha, Alex, Jacob, Paul and Evan. A few weren’t arriving until the next couple of days, one of which I was warned about – Burton – but not in a bad bad way just a “he’s a bit of a character” kind of way. The mind boggled!
The main arena wasn’t open but in the evening we got the bus to the District X where we caught a bit of the set of some band (never did catch their name) and had a nice chilled evening seeing what else was going on before getting the bus back.
Great day with a great bunch of peeps.
Photos
