VW Festival Life
This was a sneaky unexpected holiday, I checked my e-mails and one stood out, it was a Facebook invite advertising Dubs Int Dales VW festival. It was a must do as we had no weddings that weekend and it was only an hour’s drive from home. The festival was held at Camp Katur which is located within the beautiful Camp Hill estate in between Ripon and Bedale in North Yorkshire and only 1.5 mile off the A1.
I was expecting it to be a tiny festival, as I had never been before and the ticket prices were dirt cheap at just £15 per person for a 2 nights stay. On arrival I noticed it was much bigger than I expected with around a 1000 VW Dub fans on site.
Although there were a lot of people, it still retained the essence of a smaller festival which was nice. It still had a family focus, you could get parked easily and move the camper if you needed to leave.
There was plenty to do if you wanted to keep busy, as you can see from the photo’s Julie and I paid £20 each for 30 minutes on the Segway’s. You could hire quad bikes for £30 per half hour or you could pay to go on Aerial Extreme treetop adventure and I think we were allowed a discount off this if we showed our tickets but I can’t remember. There were more facilities we could use and you can find details here: http://www.campkatur.com/activities/
Those facilities above were part of Camp Katur but of course the festival itself had its own things going on. You could browse the stalls of which there were a few, you could purchase food and drink from enough places to give some variety over the weekend. Such as a vintage style high tea caravan with outdoor seating, a burger van that used local produce, fish and chips van, PIMMS van or if you preferred you could also use the on-site café, for cakes, coffee and snacks etc.
On the night time the site has a really lovely atmosphere, I don’t know if it was because it is one of the last festivals of the season but I found it was really chilled out and relaxing. There was a heart-warming feeling when we gathered around the old barn where the bands were playing. The barn was a fitting central point to have a beer, as it had a bar at the back, plenty of bales of hay for seating outside and we were kept warm by wood burning fire pits.
On the Saturday the festival organise a convoy through Yorkshire, where they stop at a pub for a drink. This year the convoy went into a field and organised the campers into a VW sign, a bit like those big pictures Neil Buchanan used to make at the end of Art Attack…..ah love Art Attack….happy memory. Anyway back to the point, the organiser had a drone that flew up in the air to capture the scene. You can view the drone footage here, it is impressive. I however missed the convoy, went looking for it but ended up in Bedale where I instead stumbled across a beer café that served all sorts of beers, ales and lagers that you can’t get at your average local. If this is your thing I would highly recommend a visit, here is the web-link: http://www.hemelvaart.co.uk/
I have taken some photos of the on-site glamping facilities that you can also hire. I wasn’t so much trying to advertise the glamping but they do look impressive and it was nice to be able to have a quite walk around the site on the Sunday, to get rid of my standard festival hangover. The facilities they offer look good as well, with very clean toilets, plenty of variety of glamping accommodation a shared kitchen area and even a toy shed.
So that’s the text done, but you just wanted to see the photo’s I think, so I took plenty of the cool VDubs, check em out.
