๐ผ๐ฟ | Creating Your Own Festival in Lockdown.
๐ผ๐ฟ in collaboration with Go Outdoors
We've been in lockdown for over 50 days now so it probably seems as though your ideas for staying entertained or motivated are running low, right? I mean besides the fact personally, I am becoming quite used to the lockdown life, I know some people are probably looking for new ideas. One of the things I know I'm really going to miss this summer is going to festivals. All of the ones I had planned to go to are cancelled so it looked like I would need to organise my own festival from the garden this year. The news of The Great British Campout dropped into my inbox and it definitely felt as if fate had let me know that this was the perfect event to get involved with.
Go Outdoors quickly adapted to the new changes in the current climate, became Go Indoors and wanted to inspire the British people to 'bring the great outdoors into peopleโs homes'. Since this announcement, the company have been developing exciting ideas and opportunities for people to get involved with and over the May Bank Holiday, The Great British Campout took place.
The Great British Campout is the brainchild of Ian and his team from capsandkeys who wanted to break the monotony of lockdown to camp in his back garden, along with his kids to raise money for the NHS. Go Outdoors got involved and created an entire weekend programme to facilitate that with a range of different activities, quizzes and music available to watch in your tent, streamed live through Facebook. Our favourite activity was the live cooking sessions from Greg Rutherford which definitely inspired us to have a BBQ over the weekend.
The Great British Campout is a fantastic lockdown activity idea that created a fantastic opportunity to unplug from the world and dust off that camping gear you've probably got hidden in your garden shed somewhere. We also added a festival take on it because if we're not heading to a festival this year, then we may as well bring it to our garden right?
Our set up for the weekend was really easy in comparison to a festival. I mean we didn't have to travel far, didn't have to drag all of our belongings for miles before finding a suitable pitch for the weekend. We put up our brand new pop up tent which was really easy to get set up and pitch in the garden. Our Eurohike Pop 400 DS Tent is far more spacious than I had anticipated it to be, with lots of space for all of the snacks and belongings we'd need for the duration of our garden festival. We set up our camping chairs outside of the tent, got our charcoal barbecue for camping out and started firing it up ready for some delicious BBQ food and a couple of ciders (of course!)
For our garden festival, if we didn't fancy one of the activities provided by the Go Outdoors team we decided to create a playlist of some festival performances from YouTube to sit and enjoy. Other than that I really enjoyed turning off my phone for the duration of our festival, watching a film on Netflix under the stars, reading my book or doing some mindful colouring (which always makes me feel content). Although these times are really uncertain and quite anxious, this campout experience was exactly what I needed mentally and would definitely encourage people to do it for themselves during the lockdown.
This isn't just an ideal lockdown activity for couples, single people to participate in but the entire family could definitely get to grips with it. Although, I cannot wait to be able to get out there and camp in the gorgeous English countryside once this is all over.
We're definitely planning another campout/festival experience in our garden soon!
The Great British Campout has already raised over ยฃ170k (which is amazing!) so if you are inspired to get involved and have your own campout, why not donate ยฃ2 for your "pitch fee" here.
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