*sighs*
Look. I like camping. But the last two trips have been so offputting that right now, I feel like binning my tents and never setting foot on a campsite again.
I freely admit that I use Twitter as a steam valve but I do try to keep this blog reasonably positive. If I don’t enjoy something, it doesn’t get a post. But I’ve had some inconsiderate neighbours while camping recently and I think it’s time for a rare lovely cathartic post about how sometimes your lovely peaceful camping trip gets utterly ruined and you go out of your mind with rage and tiredness. Sometimes things aren’t beautiful or they aren’t how you hoped and let’s put this out there to counteract all the camping equivalent of posing in a long foofy dress.
Yes. Camping is a beautiful peaceful occasion, time to spend in the fresh air, enjoying the outdoors and the sounds of nature – and the motorway that the website didn’t mention is well under a mile away. I recognise that not everyone feels that way about camping and that’s why I seek out small campsites that describe themselves as “quiet”, “peaceful”, “please keep noise and light disturbance to a minimum”. What I’ve had this weekend is a succession of the rudest, most inconsiderate neighbours ever on the loudest “quiet oasis campsite” I’ve ever had the misfortune to stay on. It feels mean-spirited to write a review of a campsite tearing it to shreds but I’m not naming it or giving you enough clues to find it, I’ve been ever so nice to the poor owner and I’ll leave her a nice review somewhere public in my legal name to make up for it.
(And in the spirit of that, the only picture of the campsite in question is in the featured image, which is taken in the dark. All other pictures are other campsites.)
On paper, the campsite is lovely. Award-winning toilet block, working farm, middle of the countryside, pitches to fit any level of service required, adult-only semi-private pitches and they take campers for just one night, even over bank holidays, which is like gold dust. In practice, the owners are delightful and can’t do enough to help and are very proud of their lovely campsite which has five star reviews.
Reader, I’ve hated my time here.
The lovely owner started by moving the pitch I’d booked – closer to the toilet block, she said, convenient, electric pitch. I didn’t care – a pitch is a pitch, so I agreed to it. And then she said the words that set off klaxons, alarms, flashing lights and deep deep crimson flags:
Since you’re a solo person on your own, I thought you’d like to be with other people instead of stuck away down there by yourself.
Oh. Oh. Honey, no. I hate other people. If you’ve heard other people saying that, sure, they think they mean it. My hatred for other people burns like a billion blazing suns in a billion multiverses. Those suns pale into insignificance beside my hatred, in fact. And it’s been proved right..
Now, to be fair, the main reason she moved me was apparently that on Thursday night there were two big family groups camping together next to my original pitch and she thought the front one would be quieter. Everything was meant so well and so kindly but it just didn’t work out in the end.
However, Thursday night went fine. There were three other units on the front field and one of them even came to ask if I wanted help putting my tarp up, which I refused more as a reflex than anything else – it’s very hard to put up on my own. The road noise – well, the reviews say that yes, you can hear the M5 half a mile away but it’s not a disturbance. Do these people not have ears? It’s a 24/7 roar of traffic and sounds exactly like a major motorway half a mile away. The alleged relatively minor road that goes past the front is worse. Vehicles are not approaching the farm at the legal 30mph and I swear I listened to a motorbike for a good five miles that could have been maliciously revving right outside my tent for all the noise it made. Finally, Bristol Airport is just down the road and so there are planes lining up opposite my tent to come into land seemingly 24/7. It’s the quietest of the three but it’s plain lying to say I can’t hear it all night too.
On Friday night, new neighbours moved in – at least six adults and five kids in three cars, one tent and a gazebo with windowed sides in the opposite back corner of the front field. From the moment they arrived they made a noise like it was the middle of the afternoon. I’d have caught every word they said from the other side of the field if I understood the language they yelled, shrieked, cackled and guffawed in. They spent half an hour inflating airbeds with an electric pump that sounded like an overheating hoover starting at ten past eleven. They had a set of ludicrously powerful lights rigged to the front of their gazebo which pointed right into my tent and they treated the “quiet oasis” campsite like an 18-30 party.
In my tent, I got more and more furious. Midnight. Will they be quiet? No? Half past midnight? No! I yelled at them but it was never going to carry that distance even in silence. And to be honest, it wasn’t meant to. I ranted and raved on two Twitter accounts all night and then deleted most of it in the morning. I wanted to go home. I wanted to sob. I wanted to take a garden tool I don’t have with me and can barely lift anyway and smash those lights. I wanted to smash their skulls.
At quarter past one, someone in the back field lost her temper. Screaming started. Two-way abuse, threats and what I’ll call on this non-sweary blog “Anglo-Saxon language” followed and the noisy people retaliated by throwing things at her caravan. I hid in my tent, silently cheering on my new hero but also shaking violently. And mercifully they shut up after that.
In the morning, they reported “the incident in the night” to the owner. They’d been threatened. She’d had a dog. It was a very scary situation. My poor wife, etc. I listened in absolute disbelief as this man who’d kept the entire campsite awake listed how terrible it had been for them. Once he’d returned to his tent, I slunk over to reception to quietly point out that they’d been the disruption and that they’d reacted to the admittedly extremely indelicate Anglo-Saxon request to be quiet by hurling things and in general that they weren’t the victims in the incident. She seemed to be on my side – three caravans that had already departed had given their reports. I went out for a few hours and when I returned, “they’d chosen to leave” and the poor owner promised me a much quieter night. Poor woman, this is a quiet site and she was mortified we’d had a disturbed night, to say nothing of the screaming match.
Then my new neighbours arrived.
It was 8.54pm when I started writing this on my phone. There were four of us in that field. At that point, it was clear no one else was arriving that day and this line of pitches by the hedge is usually for one-night-only-ers. So why are they right next to me in the first place? Why aren’t you doing your campers the kindness of spreading us out? Put them at the far end. Put them on the other side of the field – they’ll be gone in the morning so they’re not going to cause chaos by being on anyone else’s pitch. Why are they right next to me??
Oh, and this latest set of inconsiderate insert-Anglo-Saxon-word-heres had loud music playing through a speaker from the moment they arrived. When they moved down the field to play bowls, they turned the speaker up. By the time I was hysterically tapping this out on my phone, we must have been up to the eighth consecutive hour of music. The internet says music during daytime is fine but eight solid hours of it? Yes, I literally sobbed into my hands at one point and while I was writing this, I was sitting in the now-empty corner I should have been in all along, just crying from frustration – and admittedly, lack of sleep and probably of proper food. The owner’s act of misplaced kindness in giving me a “better” pitch condemned me to 48 hours of absolute camping hell. This was a quiet campsite. Minimal noise and light.
And worse. Did you notice the heatwave, extreme dry weather and high fire risk this week? The owner said she was asking everyone not to barbecue because it’s too dangerous. The welcome pack says don’t barbecue. The police are telling people not to barbecue. But these insert-Anglo-Saxon-heres want to barbecue and they’re going to do whatever the insert-Anglo-Saxon-here they want.
The clarion cry is always to chill, let people have fun, be reasonable, compromise. Funny how it’s always the people who booked a “quiet oasis” campsite because they wanted peace and quiet are the ones who have to “be reasonable” and never the ones who think that quiet oasis is the perfect place to blast their insert-Anglo-Saxon-here racket. No, they don’t compromise.
The owner comes round between 10 and half past to check it’s quiet. I was waiting, at a distance. They’d turned the music down by then but I could still hear it and so I requested, too tired and broken to be delicate, that she make sure it was off by 11, otherwise we’d have a repeat of the night before. I also told on them about the barbecue, which she wasn’t at all pleased with. I got a “that should never have happened!” and I caught some sharp words addressed at them before I decided to run away and hide to make sure they didn’t connect that with me.
Actually, it wasn’t such a bad evening. I lay in the middle of the main field and watched the sky, trying to spot Perseids although I only really spotted them after I got cold and went back for my camp blanket. I saw a spectacular one – only lasted a second or so but it soared across the sky and for that second, I thought it would land on the hill and set it on fire.
Is it a nice campsite? Honestly, the traffic noise is too bad for me to say yes. I wouldn’t come back because of that alone. But I definitely wouldn’t come back given the examples of fellow campers it attracts. At a sociable campsite, I’m a grouch. But *wails this bit as loud as possible* I booked this place because it’s a quiet oasis with rules about excessive noise!! I’m not the grouch or in the wrong here and I hate this campsite. I love the owners – the one I met was so long-suffering about the dereliction of her campsite’s reputation this weekend and so desperate to fix everything. I loved that there was a communal fridge-freezer. I loved that there were dedicated washing-up sinks packed with washing-up liquid and sponges and cloths and brushes and the food waste bin was right there where it was actually going to be used. I loved that there was a tiny shop in a shipping container where you could buy an ice cream or a drink straight from the fridge. I loved the variety of the pitches. There’s a lot to love. But there was too much road noise and this weekend there was too much general noise.
*And I lied about never going camping again – by the time you read this, I’ll be in my tiny yellow one-man tent on a campsite in Iceland, the first of five nights under canvas. Non-optional, I’m afraid – solid roof accommodation this time of year in Iceland is extortionate and the tent allows me an absolutely free spontaneous itinerary.