CarFest North

Bolesworth Estate, Cheshire
22nd - 26th July

If I could design a festival for the Radford Family, CarFest would be a pretty impressive match!  Cars, Music, Food and activities for kids!  What a weekend and it was all for Charity!

On our first full day in the festival Steve managed to arrange Press and Pit Passes. This gave us full access to the car paddock and right to the front of the stage in the pits!!  The boys have never been to a festival event like this before and were absolutely blown away when they found themselves right by the stage for one of their all time favourite songs; The Fratellis “Chelsea Dagger”.

Friday night’s lineup on the main stage was probably my favourite evening. Fratellis, The Charlatans, Basement Jaxx were followed by headliner was Rag'n'bone man. The whole evening was incredible, but “Human” gave Eddie and I chills. 

I’m not much of a car person, but even I could grasp the calibre of cars at this event!  I loved the fact that £2.75million cars were on display next to Herbie, next to a 109 year old Rolls Royce, next to a Praga.  We had a fascinating chat with the team that had brought the Praga car to the event. Steve and I had never heard of the brand and were treated to a potted history.  When we found the boys and shared our excitement Eddie piped up;

“Oh, we have a praga at school”.  Teenagers can take the wind right out of your sails.

We spent quite a lot of money at the fairground. George was a bit worried about the faster rides, so we started him off with gentle ones. By the end of the weekend he was screaming to go faster on the waltzer!
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I spent less time than I expected down at the Kitchen Stage. I love cooking, and the lineup was impressive, but I was so busy exploring with the boys I just forgot about the cooking. 

My absolute favourite moment of the weekend was seeing Paul Heaton and Jackie Abbot on Sunday evening.  We took deckchairs and sat right at the back of the field and enjoyed watching the crowd sing along to old classics.  

All in all we had a fantastic weekend, but there were a couple of “not so great” things…

We booked Early Bird tickets and should have been able to access a few special activities on Thursday evening. Unfortunately, as the ‘set build'' was delayed and we couldn’t safely access the festival site. When they realised the issue, the CarFest organisers sent a free ice cream van and silent disco over to our camping field. I’m pretty sure our boys preferred free ice cream to a bedtime story read by Chris Evans!

The campsite was very cramped.  Although we were given a printed flyer showing how vans should be parked, the pitches were very small and many many vans were parked far too close together. Some vans had less than 1 meter between them. There was so much excitement and good will that nobody really seemed too bothered about having close neighbours (we were all probably too tired after walking and dancing the day away), however, if there had been a small fire it would have very quickly escalated and engulfed the whole site.

BUT, putting those two niggly things aside, CarFest North was a brilliant way to start our Summer 2021 Road Trip.