We attended the Druridge Bay Festival for the first time. This is located in Drudridge Bay Country Park in Northumberland. It’s a really nice location with good park ups, a lake and a nearby beach.
We arrived later in the evening and missed the first day’s events, so we caught up with some friend and enjoyed the events.
The event was well organised and well run and we plan on returning next year.
We left Calais, France in the morning and drove to Elvington airfield in York to attend Vanlove fest 2025. This is our third consecutive year at Vanlove and the scale of it keeps increasing with more than 1,200 vans on the runway. Queuing to get access to the pan was awful and the four queues were not taken in order. Vanlove can definitely do better than this! Parking on the runway was a similar experience with vans not taking in order of arrival. Thereafter we had a nice time. It was good to see Bobby, Marie and their dogs from One Life Truck It at Vanlovefest and hear Mark (Bobby’s dad) talk about their plans for the MAN 8X8 truck and how it will be used in the future. Sadly, Guy and Jo advised this is the last time Vanlove will be at Elvington airfield so we’ll wait to hear where the new location is and if this works with our commute from Europe enroute home at the end of our summer tour.
We are heading back early from our three week European tour to attend Vanlovefest 2024 at Elvington Airfiled in York. We started off this morning from the aire in Calais, France and arrived at Elvington in the glorious sunshine. This is our second trip to Vanlovefest and we have e a couple of friends attending this year too. We bought our MiRiders here last year so I’m looking forward to cycling past all of the vans on the runway – and we have Lola our Miniature Pinscher pup with us this year (on the back of Wendy’s MiRider).
This was our first trip to Vanlovefest at Elvington airfield. We absolutely loved it. Friendly people and very well run. Whilst we were there we tested MiRider bikes and bought two – so time to get healthy!
Our second consecutive visit to Camp Quirky. The event was good, although due to our 9:30pm arrival we could not park up in the event on the Friday evening. The earliest we could park up the van was 10:00 on the Saturday morning and we were located in the overflow area. The ground is much rougher here and we really didn’t feel part of the event located down here. Pity really, as otherwise Camp Quirky is well organised and run.
We travelled from the Glasgow area arriving at Stratford race course on the Thursday evening. The area we had booked was already full so we parked up in the overflow area and had a walk around to investigate. This is a huge show with a great variety of campervans and overland vehicles to see.
We raised our usual flags to help us find our van on the way back. although they were dwarfed by some others. The flags also celebrated the Queen’s platinum jubilee on this occasion.
This image doesn’t do the show justice. There were so may vans. The video at the end of this post captures the scale of the show much better. We finished the day with a relaxing campfire.
I do like a timelapse and we watched the sunset. For some reason the video is not embedding, so it can be viewed at this link https://youtu.be/9seOwSDCFcI
It was really nice to meet and chat with more people we watch on YouTube – Greg and Lou Virgoe, Rick and Debs Beechwood, John and Mandy. We met Alex Frood and Liam the Terrible at Quirky a couple of weeks back. It’s good to meet in person having watched these peoples’ van lives for quite some time.
We also started our campervan sticker collection so we just need to decide where to place these on the campervan – and get our own stickers printed of course.
The video captures an overview of the scale of the show – it’s huge. There were some brilliant vans with really fancy paint jobs and some interesting overland vehicles.
On a different topic, we are getting close to finishing the Caddy Maxi conversion in preparation for a family convoy to France. Wendy keeps us right advising we only have two days left over weekends before we depart. You can view the microcamper conversion here.
We had a mad rush after work from the Glasgow area trying to get to Kelmarsh before the gates closed at Camp Quirky at 10pm. Fortunately we made it, parked up for the night and had a walk around to become familiar with everything.
The weather on Saturday was glorious.
You can view the full video of our visit to Camp Quirky here.
So, we are just back from our first Hymerchill. After arriving late I realised I couldn’t fill Hylda with water as I had forgotten the tap adapter. We soon experienced the friendliness everyone talks about once a fellow late arrival lent me the tap adapter, and then when I returned it I was given a spare! Thank you to “Ian from Liverpool”. A frustrating start ended very well – and I paid back the kind favour with a beer at the bar, in between the entertaining raffle and house band.
It was interesting to see others’ vans so I’ve included a photo of the lower field we were in…
and the main field…
We enjoyed this well organised and well run event. Well done to the organising team.
And I now have a classic hymers group sticker for Hylda.
McNaughts On Tour 