The girls and Gene (my campervan).

So even though we still had 208 miles in front of us and were all a bit blurry from the night before, we turned the stereo up and greeted the Yorkshire Moors with an ear blasting Whoop Whoop and our song of the day, ‘We Are The People’ by Empire of the Sun.

Having not ever travelled in the back of Gene I was unaware of how the narrow, winding country lanes may affect the backseat campervan passengers…

Before long Heather’s face turned a whiter shade of pale (Procol Harum 1967) and we were pulling over for a sick stop. Liz, Jen and I stayed at a safe distance from Heather, keeping a close eye out for any sudden movements but luckily the moment seemed to pass as quickly as it had arrived and thankfully there was no external reminders of Barbara’s chilli con carne on the Moors. We continued the journey with Heather now in the front and me leaning slightly away from her in case of a momentary relapse.

Arriving in Edinburgh

We finally arrived in Edinburgh – the whole journey having taken 13 hours. We jumped out of Gene, congratulating her on an outstanding performance, ran down to the sea – contemplated jumping into the sea, thought better of it and jumped on a bus into town instead.

What followed was a fuzzy but fantastic three days of racing through the streets from show to show in a state of laughter and wonder. We stumbled upon improvised musicals – some hilarious – some painful, saw street theatre, promoters with flyers coming at us from all directions like giant spiders with wings, women in swimming costumes dancing to ‘I Like to Move it Move it’, dark tales of Father Christmas set in a super market, somewhere in the midst of all this Liz even managed to get a picture of herself with the comedian Dave Gorman.

One of the shows which had me creased up like a paper bag was a musical improv show called Baby Wants Candy in which the audience shouts out a made-up song title around which they have to improvise. In this show it was ‘My Stepdad Was A Gherkin’.

Liz, Heather and I all stayed in the van and both nights returned in a different state to the one in which we left thanks to the wide variety of drinking and dancing venues scattered around the city. I had decided not to pop the pop top until we got back as sometimes the sides fall down so as I was doing this, from out of nowhere Liz burst into song, filling the early morning air with a rendition of ‘Bop to the Top’ from High School Musical only changing the words to Pop to the Top which she sang over and over again, resulting in us falling about with hysterics delaying the moment when the pop top was popped.

Another amusing moment was playing a game which Heather introduced to us called: ‘Steve’ which consisted of us taking turns to shout ‘Steve’ in a busy street to see who turned around. The record was eight people in Princes Street.

Our sea view

By the end of the three days I felt like we were in a show of our own with Gene playing the lead part representing sanity and stability even though she is a yellow campervan with flowers on the side. It was hard to leave as I had been totally captivated by the whole festival and laughed pretty much solidly for the whole time I was away, so much so that my jaw hurt and I developed stomach muscles. Bags packed, pop top safely popped down and music at the ready, MGMT (appropriately named KIDS), we Whoop Whooped our way out of Edinburgh, shouting Goodbye to pretty much everything we passed and then we were on our way to Yorkshire to stay with Heather’s friend Kate for the last part of our trip.