Music festival season is well and truly here, and it couldn’t be more exciting. With a summer of stunning line-ups across the country, there isn’t a better time to be going to your first – but, this being your first festival, you might be feeling a little trepidatious. Here are some little tips and tricks to help you prepare for and enjoy your first festival.
Essential Festival Prep
Festival preparation is a notoriously febrile experience, even for old hands with dozens of festival experiences under their belt. One of the first things you should make peace with is that no matter how much you plan and prepare, you will always feel like you’ve forgotten something until you finally touch grass in the festival grounds.
Once you’ve made peace with this, you can lose a little of your packing anxiety, and instead focus on the task at hand! The obvious items will already be on hand – beverages, tent, air mattress, sleeping bag, toiletries and more beverages –, but there are some less-obvious brings that you’ll be hugely thankful for – such as wet wipes, which are always a welcome relief when you remember you have them!
We’re fortunate to live in a time of technological bounty too; in a far cry from the olden days of phoneless festivals, today we enjoy the trappings of decent network coverage and capacious portable chargers. Bring the latter, and you don’t have to worry about losing contact with anyone throughout your festival experience.
Getting There
Another vitally important part of festival planning is, naturally, transport. Many festivals are accessible by public transport, and some even partner with transport providers to enable easy passage to the site. However, most festival-goers will inevitably drive.
If you’re not yet on the other side of your driving test, you might be looking for public transport solutions – but if driving is easier for you, there is an option. Learner insurance lets you drive in a car along with a license-owning supervisor, so you can take your friends down with only a provisional license in the right conditions!
Navigating the Festival
After packing and travelling, we come to the festival itself. No two festivals are equivalent, and your own festival experience will differ hugely from the experiences of others. Still, your approach to navigating the grounds can be the same.
First off, make sure to buy the programme or lanyard on the way in! This will have a map of the site, and will inevitably save your skin at some point during the weekend. Set meeting points with your friends each day, too, so that if you get separated – and if you don’t have the signal to contact one another – you can reconvene at regular points in the day.
