Plus point to winning tickets to Wilderness – an excuse to buy the new weekend tent I’ve been wanting 😉 Just realised I forgot to take any pictures of it though, what a shame, will just have to take it away again….
I bought the Vango Icarus 600. I loved our Vango Vista, although it did have a few flaws, like the leaking door. (Fixed on later models I’m given to understand.) And it was pre SIG (sewn in groundsheet) days, so you could get leakage under the edge of the tent if you didn’t pitch it right. But I could pitch it on my own, from start to finish in 40 minutes, and a lot of that was fiddling around with the groundsheet, so I had high hopes that the Icarus would be even easier.
I think, had I ignored the helpful man in the camping shop, it would have been. But he insisted the way to do it is to peg the four corners, then put in the middle pole, put it under tension with the peg and ring system and then guy it. Then you put in the two end poles.
The drawback to that is that when you’re putting the second and third poles in, you’re trying to feed them through a tent partly under tension and no longer flat on the floor. And in the dark (don’t ask) with wailing children (really, you don’t want to know) and knowing you’ve a 20 minute round walk to fetch the rest of the sleeping things from the car before you can put wailing children to bed, it’s not a good combination. The whole thing took me an hour to do, which was not what I’d had in mind at all.
I shall try my method in the garden – I’m betting 20 minutes start to finish…especially as I left the inner attached when I took it down 😉
Anyways, that’s the new tent. The event was the Wilderness Festival, I won tickets to it from Have a Lovely Time. It was the first time I’d gone just me and the kids to a festival of any kind – our previous excursions were with lots of other families to Hesfes, the home educators festival. That was quite a few years ago too, when the number of children in the family was 2, instead of 3 and a promise 😉
I think I learnt some stuff. I learnt that close doesn’t really mean close when they are talking about parking and campsites. I learnt that apparently fire risks in tents don’t apply in festival settings (somehow it’s magically safe enough to pitch your tents touching each other, even though no commercial campsite would dream of such a situation.) My children didn’t agree, and neither did I, so I made a big hairy nuisance of myself with security and got a response team to find me a pitch. In my defence it was dark, and two of the kids were losing it quite badly – it was either that or climb back in the car and drive 3 1/2 hours back home, which didn’t appeal all that much either.
So we got pitched, and in the end we had a pretty good day on Sunday. The kids both had a go at chalk carving, and spent ages on it. We explored the kids area and Big got her face painted, while Small spent ages on the microscopes at the Meet the Species stall. (Big got to hold a slowworm too there, I was rather jealous. I’ve never even seen one before!) Big tried out stilts, and Small enjoyed the pirate play with “the loud man”.
In our down time in the tent, Small read, Big drew and Smallest and I slept. Which makes it pretty successful down time from my point of view 😀 All in all, we enjoyed parts of it, though there were definitely things I would do differently. Like try to have something with wheels to get things from parking to campsite. I thought I’d read in the download guide that there were trolleys available, but the download guide has been removed now, so I can’t check. And I’m not sure whether I’d be able to talk either of the children into going again, but maybe when they’ve had some sleep.
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