Tent Sniffing for Beginners

You know me dear blog reader, I love camping.  I've been known to camp in my own garden, and often in campsites less than a mile from my home. The joy of the birds singing, the sound of the trees creaking in the night (and during one particularly stormy night the sound of a tree crashing to the ground 100 yards from the tent!), the feel of the breeze though a loosely tethered flap...  But this post is not the convince you that camping is fun, that goes without saying! No one remembers childhood holidays where you stayed in a nameless hotel by a hot beach (well I don't, probably because we never did..but anyway..) but we all remember the joy of a camping holiday, cleaning your teeth in a field, spitting toothpaste into the wind (school boy error), traipsing to a cold shower block at dawn, through cow pats and getting lost amongst unfamiliar tents because you forgot your glasses...ah bliss  *pause to think of the wild open spaces*  But this post is to say that ...

Friday arrived damp and drizzly. We donned wellies (and clothes, I wasn't allowed to wander naked, the teen DD had forbidden it, tsk, teens eh) And headed down to the festival for some breakfast. The field by the Other Stage was a quagmire. Proper sticky, slippy Glastonbury mud. Hungover festival goers slithered and slid along the walkways, sometimes falling with a satisfying 'splat'. We stopped for breakfast of bacon and egg in a bap (well I did, DD claimed not to be hungry) and then walked about in the mud, we squelched onward and suddenly were forced, FORCED, to eat warm blackberry and apple pie with cream, when we spotted the aptly named Just Desserts (absolutely scrumptious!)  We then staggered onward to the kids field as DD had been dying to visit and see what was going on there. By this time the sun was out, so I lounged while she played in the spider tower, the pingpong thunderdome and other assorted amusements. I wasn't just watching beards (I was). Later...

Early on Wednesday morning (I say early it was actually 8am - the time the gates opened at Glastonbury) I set off with some trepidation, (and DD)  to the biggest music festival in the UK. The journey was stupidly easy, no queues anywhere despite AA signs and dire warnings online of long waits around the site. We arrived at the Purple car park as instructed and were shown to a parking spot about as far from the main festival site as was possible without still being at home. The view from the car park (which was high on a hill) over the festival was amazing. We had packed light (we hadn't) and so we put the trolley together and set off. We camped on Hitchin Hill as the family camping was already full when we arrived at 11am. It was very steep but luckily DD's beauty and my feeble helplessness attracted manly types to grab the trolley and RUN with it to the top of the hill in a show of awesome macho-ness. We pitched the tent, dropped the trolley and our valuables off at t...