Camping in the rain at Curious Arts Festival

Last weekend I was invited down to Curious Arts Festival in my capacity as book blogger, but, as it involves camping, it's also an excellent opportunity to test my credentials as an 'outdoor blogger', and for that matter 'festival goer'.
Well, looking at my 'drowned rat' photo, taken after putting up the tent in a torrential downpour, I think I'm now hardened as both!
The weather forecast had fooled us, or maybe we'd understood 'showers' to be something much more gentle but we hadn't packed waterproof jackets or wellies! When we arrived there seemed little hope of the rain stopping, and merely walking from the car to the entrance we'd already got wet, so we just carried on and got the tent up even though soaked, then bought curry from The Happy Gurkha (one of many food outlets on site) to warm us up, and went along to see Izzy Bizu in the 'Big Top' tent (more of the actual festival here)





By this point the weather looked like it might brighten ...

... I strung the outside lights INSIDE the tent to brighten things up a bit ..












and by Saturday morning things didn't look too bad ...





The sun was shining, the tent had withstood MORE heavy rain overnight and for a while things looked good ..

then the rains came again!












That, give or take, set the mood for the weekend - some glorious sunshine, some dreadful downpours - but there was enough space inside the events marquees for everyone to just about huddle out of the rain, and sun on the car dried the wet clothes and shoes.

It definitely wasn't as muddy as Glastonbury can be, we didn't have the floods I've seen photos of at Download, but it's the first time we've had to cope with rain while camping and it wasn't too bad. Practising putting the tent up at home definitely helped it go up without a hitch in the rain. Sometimes we retreated to our tent to have space to flop down, and let the dog relax off his lead, and I'm glad we had head room to stand, and chairs to sit in, but I didn't miss the opening sides which I thought would be nice, or even an extra window. Maybe when it's raining you just want to huddle inside your tent and forget the outside world!

In case you're interested, you can find out more about Curious Arts Festival on their website here, my write-up of this year's festival here and the tent's a Quechua Arpenaz 4.1 from Decathlon