Caravan Travels

I’m a bit ‘after the fact’ with this blog entry as I usually do them on a day-by-day basis whilst in-situ. However, I’m writing this entry on the day after returning home from our latest trip away with the caravan. It was a hectic week and as today is a rest-day, it seems like it’s the ideal occasion to bring the blog up-to-date.

On Wednesday 12th we set-off for our third, annual stay at the Barnstones Caravan Site just outside Banbury in Oxfordshire. The reason we go there each August is to attend Fairport Convention’s annual Cropredy Music Festival which this year ran from Thursday 13th to Saturday 15th. The campsite is a short drive from the festival area and suits us perfectly.

We arrived around 2pm on Wednesday to set-up the caravan in a temperature of around 32°C – not pleasant! This was the UK’s fifth heatwave of the Summer, and many areas of the country – Oxfordshire included – haven’t seen any rain for some weeks. Most of England is currently under drought restrictions and there is far less ‘green’ to be seen in the landscape as parched grasses everywhere have turned brown in the absence of rain.

After setting everything up we had a brief respite from the heat when we drove down to Tesco in Banbury to pick up our ‘click and collect’ order. The air-conditioning in my car gave us a blessed relief from the oppressive temperature for a while, at least! Back at the caravan we quickly put everything away, even though the caravan fridge seemed to be struggling to get down to its optimum working temperature in the heat. I adjusted the fridge settings to run on gas as caravan fridges always cool down quicker on gas rather than on electricity. (Once they’re nice and cold you can then switch them to electricity).

By around 6.30pm things had calmed-down sufficiently to allow me to put up our smaller air-awning. Fortuntely, our (fully-serviced) pitch had the right dimensions to allow us to park the door-side of the caravan right up to a patch of grass, and yet still manage to reach the fresh water/waste-water drainage/electrical hook-up post. The reason I mention this is because it it so much easier to drill the awning pegs into grass rather than the gravel of a hard-standing pitch. (I use a power drill with screw-in ground pegs; a camping mallet could never do on a hard-standing pitch.) Once we’d installed our Mestic fridge (full of drinks cans and water bottles) in the awning, set-up our camping chairs and one or two other items, we were all sorted! Phew!

By this time it was around 7.30pm (the much-vaunted partial solar eclipse had passed its maximum), and so we decided to drive to a lovely pub called “The George” in a village called Barford St Michael to meet-up with Helen’s sister Katherine and her husband Paul, and two old friends Nik & Vic who were staying there. They had also come up to attend the music festival. The six of us had a nice dinner at the pub and enjoyed the catch-up until we returned, exhausted to the caravan and retired for the night with multiple fans blowing to try to keep us cool!

Thursday morning saw us have a late-ish start to the day. The festival starts at 4pm on the Thursday each year (and runs until 11pm), and we’d very little else to do prior to driving down to the festival around 3pm. It was very much a case of ‘the calm before the storm’. The temperature was around 35°C and was due to be the hottest day of the week in the Banbury area.

When we got into the car to go to the festival we had prepared as best we could for the prevailing conditions – we had fans, hats, cold drinks, sun parasols – you name it and we had it with us! There’s no natural shade in the middle of the festival field – you have to make your own.

The ‘parking field’ is a few hundred yards from the main festival field but we have a very good trolley which we use to transport everything we need to take with us, so that always works well. The heat was quite extreme on the field but a 6-7 mph breeze was a blessing. Each year Fairport Convention sell around 6,500 tickets for the three-day event. On this Thursday afternoon the numbers on the field were a bit down, however; the likelihood was that many people had decided to stay-away on the first (shorter) day because of the heat.

The bands who played were excellent, as ever, and the headline act on this first day was a Canadian band called “Le Vent du Nord’ which we’ve seen before at Cropredy. Their slot ran from around 9.40pm until the end of the evening at 11pm. The extreme heat had gone by around 8pm, however, and the temperature was really comfortable sitting on the field until the band finished their set. Once again, we had to have all the fans on in the caravan overnight, however, to cope with the heat which had built-up over the day, despite having all the roof windows open and windows shaded.

Friday was a bit cooler(!) at around 32°C and on Fridays (and Saturdays) the festival runs from midday to midnight. We decided to arrive a little bit after the start – at around 3pm. Part of the reason for that is that we had to drive to Banbury train station to pick up another of Helen’s (three) sisters – Clare and her partner Gareth. They had travelled-up from London and needed to get to the festival’s ‘Glamping Field’ to where they were staying. Also, they had an urgent need to visit Tesco to pick-up essential supplies of alcohol!

After arriving at the main festival field, more great acts performed for us through till midnight. One of my favourite acts who played for us today, and another one we’ve seen at Cropredy previously, was the Spooky Men’s Chorale, a very irreverent Australian male voice choir. They are incredibly talented, extremely good singers and very funny all at once!

By the end of the night’s performance at midnight I was actually feeling a bit chilly in only a t-shirt and shorts. I decided I’d come better prepared the following day!

I was feeling a bit rough on Saturday morning (not alcohol-related, I assure you), and decided to have a few extra quiet hours in the caravan before joining Helen for the final day of the festival, at around 6pm. Today’s temperature was in the high 20s °C and there were bits of cloud in the sky which gave some relief from the sun; altogether it was a much more comfortable day. As on the previous two days, a variety of great acts took to the stage, culminating in a two-hour headline slot from the festival’s organisers the great Fairport Convention.

Helen has been following the band for well-over twenty years (and has attended the festival every year apart from the two years when the event had to be cancelled due to Covid. I am a mere novice with a mere seven festivals under my belt!). As always the band were superb and the full-capacity crowd on the field loved every minute of their performance, despite it now being pitch-dark and a bit chilly. Having learned from my mistake of the previous evening, I was wearing long trousers and a long-sleeved top!

After two late nights on the trot, (arriving back at the caravan around 1am), we had a bit of a lie-in on Sunday morning. Not for too long though, as we had things to do! The first order of business was to drive down to the glamping field to collect Clare and Gareth and all their stuff. Next was the annual post-festival outing to Cropredy Village Hall for a delicious full-English breakfast! The main event of the Sunday of Festival Weekend, however, is to attend the annual cricket match between Cropredy Village and Fairport Convention (with a few additional players such as my brother-in-law Paul who plays for the band every year).

Now, I’m a Scotsman and I know absolutely nothing whatsoever about cricket and it’s seemingly impenetrable rules. (It’s an English game after all; we don’t play it in Scotland). However, the group of us spectators who gathered under the shade of a big oak tree near the boundary fence were only very slightly interested in the cricket, so that was fine in my book! The final score saw Cropredy Village beat Fairport by about 20 runs. The margin would have been much higher had Paul not achieved an impressive 50 runs himself!

At around 6pm Helen and I took Clare and Gareth to the train station before we went to our favourite Banbury Italian Restaurant for a delicious meal to round-off the weekend with friends Nik and Vic. Once again we were well-ready for sleep when we got back to the caravan, which on this occasion was much cooler – hooray!

Monday was a totally lazy day I’m happy to say. We did very little at all, although Helen did go for walk along the canal which runs through Cropredy Village. By this time I’d pulled a muscle in my back and didn’t fancy the walk. Quite frankly, I was feeling my age and needed the rest! We rounded-out our day by eating at the caravan and getting a few jobs done to save time in the morning – departure day.

Tuesday morning came all too-early, and we packed everything away and prepared to depart from Barnstones. By now we have a well-developed routine where Helen sorts out all the stuff inside the caravan (fridge, food, bedding, cleaning everything etc.) whilst I do all the outside jobs (fresh water, waste water, toilet cassette, taking down the awning, caravan security devices removed, car back seat put down and boot loaded, electricity hook-up extension, fitting the overtaking mirrors to the car etc, etc, etc). There’s a really long list of jobs to do on both arrival and departure days.

Our final job is to go through our long list ticking things off to make sure we’d not missed-out anything vital. Once all that’s done our very final jobs are to adjust the overtaking mirrors and check the electrics on the caravan to ensure all the lights are working as they should. For me, that’s all the hard bit down – driving home seems much more relaxing after all the jobs are done. Don’t tell Helen I said that, though; she’d have a hairy fit if I told her I felt relaxed whilst towing the caravan!