Luxury Festival Living! CarFest North by Motorhome

Zagan the motorhome’s broken his festival duck, providing us with a full-on luxury festival living experience at CarFest North, the event created by Chris Evans in support of Children in Need. You can’t beat having your own bed, kitchen, bathroom, living room and fridge when parked up in a field! Along with 30-odd thousand other festival-goers, we’ve had one hell of an experience, only getting soaked by rain once and hardly seeing even a pocketful of mud! Not only did we have a cracking time, we returned home as Guinness World Record holders, yeah baby!

CarFest North – We’re in there somewhere – Image from Will Bailey, www.chesterchronicle.co.uk

Ju bought the tickets way back in November 2017, with both of us squinting and sucking breath at almost £500 for the two of us, including three days of motorhome parking without electricity. In the end, that seemed like a great deal, given the sheer amount of stuff going on, the massive array of top-notch musicians, comedians, chefs, a bloke in a jet suit (I kid you not), plus a percentage of the ticket price goes to Children in Need, which of course we’re more than happy to support.

We were also lucky that our friends Richard and Jenny went too, fellow vanners who we met wandering about Estonia and later shared some cracking memories from the Finnish World Wife Carrying Championship to the midnight sun in the Norwegian Arctic. They’ve sold their motorhome since returning home to help fund a massive renovation project they’re working on, so were using Richard’s folks adventure wagon instead. They’d got ‘early bird’ tickets so arrived on-site on Thursday evening. We opted to travel up Thursday too, but stayed at a local farm campsite a few miles away.

The Thursday night campsite was just a field really (a small child loudly declared it to be a bit sh*t!), but it did us for a good night’s kip.

Friday morning we were up and at ’em, expecting massive traffic jams entering the site, despite the one-way systems and traffic lights we’d seen being set up on our way past the night before. Perhaps we were too keen, as we saw nothing and just cruised into the site, being helped into a spot near our mates (and close to the festival entrance) by a helpful marshal. The motorhome pitches were all marked out and 9m by 6m in size, so we had plenty of room. Once we’d parked up and flicked the fridge onto gas, we did the usual check on facilities: huge bins and recycling points, a tap for drinking water by the festival entrance, large tanks provided for chemical loo emptying, there were also lots of loos as well as gents and ladies shower blocks. Bob on.

Motorhome parking at CarFest North

Great to be there with Richard and Jenny – these guys are a lot of fun!

At this stage in the game, the sun was glaring down on us all, and the earth was baked hard underfoot. The campervan section gradually filled up, with everything from 9m+ rigs with dual air con units on the roof all the way down to wee VW classic campers. There were a good number of modern VW pop-tops too, and you could watch one being built in three days on one of the stands, before it was auctioned off for Children in Need. Failing that, shell out about £35k (errrmmm??? You could have two Zagans for that???) and you could get one of the off-the-shelf vans on display. Swift were there too, advertising their rental vans (at roughly £100 a day), complete with motorhomewifi.com Internet kit factory-fitted (a roof-mounted 4G antenna and personal WiFi hotspot), just like we have in Zagan.

CarFest North Map

Motorhome stuff aside, the fields around Bolesworth Castle were heaving with things to entertain our eyeballs, ears, nostrils and stomach during the day. Drinking water was laid on around the site, and we’d been encouraged to bring our own bottles to avoid plastic waste (coolio). Glass and booze weren’t allowed on site (you could drink, but had to buy it from the official bars, or sneak your own stuff in…), but you could bring your own grub which we did. The walk back to the vans was only about 20 mins, so we would shift back and forth as we got tired or hungry. Although we enjoyed the festival grub we bought, it was heavy on price so we opted to cook in the van for most meals.

One of the many food stalls at CarFest North

Unfortunately the lake was suffering an infestation of blue-green algae, so the on-water activities weren’t happening, but there was so much to do we didn’t notice. Motorcross and horse jumping, cooking demonstrations, a bloody fantastic wall-of-death (well worth that £3 each to get in), a monster truck, a wonderful array of cars pootling, blasting or sliding around the narrow track which runs through the whole site, the hilarious ‘Red Barrows’ display team, tons of stuff for kids, the list goes on, and that was before the main stage(s) came alive at night. I say ‘stages’ as they had two on the go as they switched between the left and right ones as the acts changed.

And what acts! I’m not much of a music man. Yep, I love listening to it, but nope, I’d never heard of Burt Bacharach, didn’t recognise Judge Jules when he walked on stage, and I thought George Ezra must be at least 50. A popmaster, I am not. But Madness I know, and Jools Holland, Bananarama, Rick Astley and Billy Ocean I at least know of! Having sussed out we didn’t want to be sat down, we made our way into the standing area each evening, managing to finally get right to the front as the night wore on. Up front Chris Evans was the consummate showman, his usual effervescent self. Along with this wife (pregnant with twins) and kids, they made the whole thing feel like a MASSIVE family get-together. It was a bit weird, but a serious lot of fun. Despite the huge range of live acts, my favourite parts were Chris leading us all in a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, and him again getting us all to sing a video message to Peter Kay, who should have been there but has had to cancel all of his live appearances.

As well as everything else going on, Ju and I had a crack at the Festival Dash, a 5km run around the race track one morning (thanks to Rich and Jen for getting up and grabbing pics for us!), and entered the successful World Record Head Banging attempt, no less. Along with almost 600 others, we all blew away the previous 300-odd four-year old record set in Australia. Whhoooaaarrrr!!! Ju’s just confirmed we can get World Record Holder certificates for £20 each. Hmmm, tempting but nah, we’ll make do with these photos!

Can you ‘spot’ us?

Ju is King of the Mountains at the CarFest Dash!

The blow-up horse beaten by a nose by a resurgent Freddie Mercury

The Guinness Man, He Say ‘YESSSSS’!!!

Another one to add to our Retrospective Bucket List

The sunshine on the Friday cooked us that evening and kept us warm on Saturday, but rapidly exited stage left on Sunday where we got a taste of being lashed on! I’d managed to forget to repack any of my clothes, so thanks again Richard for lending me a coat! Come Sunday evening it dried up again and the final evening was rounded off, a bit oddly, with an Irish dance troupe and fireworks. Chris had given his all by this point (as had we), and was struggling to speak! Hats off to him, his wife (who we saw on her hands and knees looking around trying to find a ring someone had dropped over the barrier – how hands-on is that), his kids and the thousands of staff who looked after us so well.

Well done Chris!!! Image: Charlie Raven, www.chesterchronicle.co.uk

Would we do it again? The truth: we dunno. The festival is most certainly worth the money, but there are many other things to try and get done on this Earth, and we feel we had such a great time we might simply not be able to repeat it! We’ll see though, never say never…

Cheers, Jay