Best things you have watched on a campsite?

[Milliways]

We have been away lots this year, currently at our 12th site.

I love people watching, usually tents going up and down etc but this site has the 2nd wedding reception we have come across and it is fancy dress! It is a Forest site, so lots of little girls as fairy nymphs (bridesmaids?) but there is a Peter Pan, a pirate, a very large fairy with huge wings (mother of bride we think) a Coldstream guard and lots more. It has been pouring with rain but thankfully clearing up now so lots if colourful characters playing frisbee and football in a clearing, and walking across the sure to the loos.

What is the best thing you have witnesses on a site?

at our last site, i was sat sipping my coffee and watched the dog opposite commando crawl into the awning on the next pitch and snaffle a box of weetabix! It was tethered but obviously it was too long.
I didn't see the fall out because I went for a shower but all seemed ok between the neighbours the the few days afterwards!
I probably should have intervened but it was very early am!

A family of six badgers playing for about an hour. It was 3am and they demolished the bins!

Oh and a bloke in a caravan on the next pitch trying to level his van onto blocks. Every time he tried to get the caravan onto the blocks (he'd stacked two on top of each other) the blocks went flying 10ft across the pitch. But he just kept trying and trying and trying in exactly the same manner with exactly the same result.

It is now like a onesie party. Lots of people arriving at the campsite in various onesies, very odd!.

I would have like to have seen badgers. We have watched New Forest ponies and donkeys rampage into tents, and had red kites landing in sites, but never badgers.

Levelling vans is fun too! Couldn't believe our luck that this weekend we pulled the handbrake and the van was perfectly level. I love watching people arguing over how the tents go up though :)

And I wouldn't have intervened with the dog LetItBe, I would have been laughing and willing him to get away with it

I loved watching the family opposite us a couple of years ago. We arrived in our usual chaos after hours cooped up in a car, spent the next couple of hours arguing about how to put the tent up, the kids bickered constantly and our tent and surrounding area looked like Steptoe's yard.
Camping Family were up at the crack of dawn, their tent was immaculate, guy ropes all at uniform angles, everything was perfect. They disappeared off site at about 9am with their teenagers while ours were still in their sleeping bags, and their evening meals were always a leisurely affair with lots of laughter and wine.

In my head we are Camping Family, with healthy outdoor glows and looking like we've stepped out of a catalogue. In reality we are so not.

The ndn on our last camping trip arrived at the no-frills site wearing white jeans, white l/s cotton shirt and white loafers. He pitched his tent and proceeded to sport said garms for the entire weekend. We quietly referred to him as The Man From Del Monte. Although that's a crap nickname as he wore a cream suit but anyway.

This memory is from a long time ago, must have been when I was ten or eleven, when we used to camp in France.
We always camped with another family who had, in my memory, the biggest caravan ever, it went on and on and was full on mysterious cupboards and vast storage spaces under the seats. Under one of these seats would always be a stack of hockey sticks. I'm grinning my head off about this now as the thought of having 'hockey sticks' on my camping list is hilarious, anyway, they always brought hockey sticks.

We always camped at the same site (for about 7 years) in Brittany, very basic, two star, only 3 British toilets, and we would always go right at the end of August so for the last week or so the site would slowly empty and eventually a space big enough would appear for a hockey match to occur.

My father was a hockey referee and had a whistle.

So Les Anglais would commence playing and slowly but surely other campers (mostly French) would emerge and after standing and watching bemusedly would eventually join in. Hockey sticks would be handed over and brooms and god knows what else long hard implement would appear and there would be just an insane game of international hockey occurring in the middle of a campsite with my father in turns taking it very seriously and awarding penalties for over enthusiastic swinging of brooms as the ball and then being doubled up with laughter.

You couldn't play the whole time as there were enough sticks so half the match would be spent watching and shouting and laughing.

So yes, that's probably my best thing I've ever seen.

That is brilliant Slubber

Slubber, that sounds great like something out of a film.

Mine was arriving after a long drive at our pitch to see the couple in the tent across from us (marked pitches) quickly getting into their chairs, shouting "they're here". They got drinks and snacks and sat down ready to watch us get our tent up as if we were the entertainment. We didn't know them from Adam.

I've got a little tear at the memory.

We also one year pitched in the wrong place, right on the wrong site of the campsite where we should have been next to our friends. Instead of taking the tent down my father just pulled up the pegs securing our frame tent to the ground and then went on the scavenge around the site for 7 other people of reasonable strength who were then invited into the tent with very basic French, given a leg each and then asked to lift and carry it around the site.

No one could see where they were going so my mother stood outside shouting "á droite! Á gauche!". All you could see were 8 pairs of feet and out big orange tent slowly trundling along the road.

I was completely mortified, and pretended they didn't belong to me, while simultaneously being transfixed by the sight of my mother shouting at a tent with feet.

In the US we were visited by various wildlife including a skunk. This led to us asking the next door neighbours what to do if a skunk wanted to eat our dinner, the reply was "let him". The skunk helped himself to various things off our table before ambling off to have a good rummage through somebody else's tent. It came back after dark, and met a German girl who proceeded to walk up to it, shine a torch right in its face and announce "ah, ads skunkie" to a shocked intake of breath from everyone else on the site. Luckily for her he was obviously a very mellow skunk because he just looked at her and went off to steal more food. We heard and smelt him later on having a good explore between the fly sheet and inner of our tent. There were also foxes, raccoons, deer and millions of bats at that site too, it was amazing.

We just returned from a week in a caravan in St Austel, there was a random chicken that came over for breakfast every morning, but the real entertainment was the caravan next to us.

The couple had 6 kids between 5 and 10 at a guess. The mum kept putting them in their room for time out, without fail they would just sneak out of the caravan bedroom via the windows.

The man spent 7 hours washing and polishing his car on the first day, we thought he was going to cry when a seagull pooped on the super shiney bonnet.

Slubber wins (as always) I once watched a family attempting to capture their paraquet which had escaped from its cage. They probably had hockey sticks too

Slubber, the Dutch boy next to us has just got his hockey stick out the car!

Please please write a book Slubber.

We have just returned from France where we spent a leisurely evening watching 4 rather perplexed Frenchmen trying to put up the smallest 2 man tent I have ever seen! They had obviously never put it up before and had no idea what it was supposed to look like. Eventually they resorted to googling it on a phone, but it didn't seem to help. After about 2 hours they got it up but it was far too small for them. So they gave up and spent the rest of the evening sat around on the ground drinking wine beside their car. They were gone before we got up in the morning. I have no idea where they all slept

Hilarious Chumhum. When camping it's easy to forget/not care you are very public/audible, you kind of carry on like you're in the privacy of your own home watching all the comings and goings around you like it's moving images on a TV...

love this thread.

I've seen some wonderful things: People on stilts, a 'onesie' evening, fire dancers, impromptu drum/didgeridoo session round the campfire, people dressed as fairies, and this year, a wedding.

We are at St Austell atm. Yesterday I heard a couple of shots from behind the hedge (there is a lake about 15 mins walk away). Suddenly a duck fell to the ground right in front of our tent and rolled over and over before jumping up and running away round the back of another tent. I followed to see if she was ok but the poor thing was terrified and burrowed into the hedge where I couldn't see her. About half an hour later she reappeared and had a bit of a quack then took off and flew away. I was so glad she was ok but couldn't believe she'd fallen all that way and survived!

Slubber We take hockey sticks (I'm too embarrassed to take them again now though).
This thread has been the funniest thing I've read in a while...have you all read The Tent, The Bucket and Me...if not - head to Amazon and order it....

Last summer we saw a man at a campsite throw the biggest toddler style tantrum ever, because he couldn't work out how to put his tent up. Maybe he'd borrowed it, and there were no instructions.

Normally people would offer to help in that situation (it looked like a simple tunnel tent) but he seemed too angry to approach.

He growled and swore at it for ages, circling the groundsheet and picking up poles to stare at them before throwing them back down in disgust.
Eventually he tried to raise the structure but it wouldn't stay up, so he went mad, snapping poles in a rage and stamping on them before gathering the whole lot up, flysheet and all, and unceremoniously ditching it by the bins.

Then he hopped into his car and with much furious crunching of gears, he tore off never to be seen again.

Never seen anything like it before or since.

Back home now and missing it already but loving reading everyone's stories.

(This morning the Wedding Onesies were still around, including assorted animals, a Woody (Toystory) and a cute baby bear.If you went down to the woods today you would have had a big surprise.)

Really enjoying the camper going all Basil Faulty on his tent Pictish