They cost a fortune, and you have to tax and maintain them all the rest of the year. And park them of course (which we couldn't do in Walthamstow). At present it's very difficult/impossible to hire them for the weekend, which would work for many people -- but would still be incredibly expensive (I think probably £800 for a two-person van for Glasto might be a reasonable working assumption for a weekend's peak rate hire).
We've thought about it vaguely because the amount of clobber you end up taking when camping with kids is quite considerable. My in-laws have a van and love it; they go to jazz festivals every weekend and spend weeks at a time on the continent (and their's has a *shower*!!!). And if you have a van you have literally zero set-up -- all your festival kit lives in the van, so all you have to do when you get to the festival is park. There are loads of campervans and caravans at the sort of festival we go to.
They're not markedly more comfortable than tents -- they're much smaller, for one thing. It's easier to cook, but who cooks at festivals anyway?
Festival toilets are much nicer than they used to be (NB at the sort of festivals I go to, mostly attended by nice civilised middle-class people of mature years!) but it would be v. nice to have en-suite at night. But Lidl sell a portable toilet for £30 which is basically identical to the sort you get in campervans and I'm told lots of people use that in tents, either in a spare bedroom pod or in a separate toilet tent. In the day most people use festival toilets anyway because, obviously, you have to empty the cassette of your van toilet or portaloo and you want to do that as little as possible.
Personally we have just decided to upgrade our tent to one that's slightly bigger and hopefully substantially more waterproof. But we're not going for a full-on family tent that's as big as many small flats; we're still basically festival campers and our tent is really just somewhere to sleep.
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Date: 2007-06-25 12:28 pm (UTC)We've thought about it vaguely because the amount of clobber you end up taking when camping with kids is quite considerable. My in-laws have a van and love it; they go to jazz festivals every weekend and spend weeks at a time on the continent (and their's has a *shower*!!!). And if you have a van you have literally zero set-up -- all your festival kit lives in the van, so all you have to do when you get to the festival is park. There are loads of campervans and caravans at the sort of festival we go to.
They're not markedly more comfortable than tents -- they're much smaller, for one thing. It's easier to cook, but who cooks at festivals anyway?
Festival toilets are much nicer than they used to be (NB at the sort of festivals I go to, mostly attended by nice civilised middle-class people of mature years!) but it would be v. nice to have en-suite at night. But Lidl sell a portable toilet for £30 which is basically identical to the sort you get in campervans and I'm told lots of people use that in tents, either in a spare bedroom pod or in a separate toilet tent. In the day most people use festival toilets anyway because, obviously, you have to empty the cassette of your van toilet or portaloo and you want to do that as little as possible.
Personally we have just decided to upgrade our tent to one that's slightly bigger and hopefully substantially more waterproof. But we're not going for a full-on family tent that's as big as many small flats; we're still basically festival campers and our tent is really just somewhere to sleep.