Positivus ’14: Sleeping Around.

While I go to a lot of festivals, I go to exactly one camping music festival each year.

The small town of Salacgrīva, Latvia doesn’t have anywhere near the number of hotel rooms that festival goers would need to all sleep in hotels. So many people are quite creative in their sleeping arrangements.
Over the years at Positivus, I’ve slept in any number of ways. I’ve slept in the main backstage when the acts were done with their dressing rooms.

I’ve slept in a nice hotel near to the festival for a night when a friend and I lucked into a hotel room–because one of the headliners decided to go back to Riga instead of staying at the festival.

I even one year managed to grab a spot in a camper used by the festival organizers when a place opened up one night.

One year at Positivus I slept in a day care that had rented rooms for the festival, on an air mattress placed on top of some nap mats! (People who had gone to day care in Soviet times said the place was exactly the same as when they were in day care!) That year I invited a friend who had been sleeping in her car to join us in the day care room as well. Sleeping in the day care was a big step up from her sleeping in the car!

This year I was sleeping backstage at the “I Love You” stage tent. I managed to be solidly asleep in the crowded backstage of the “I Love You” stage as a storm blew in, bringing cold rain and wind with it.
The artists crowded in as the bad weather forced everyone to take cover, and I lay on my air mattress (under a sleeping bag that lives at a friend’s house in Latvia) with the covers pulled up solidly over my head.

“No one sit over there, there is a person under that sleeping bag!” I could hear my friend telling people.
I eventually managed to struggle out of my sleeping bag (and put on my pants inside the sleeping bag, because backstage was really too crowded to put on my pants in public) just in time to catch a fab indie-pop cover of “Blister in the Sun” on the “I Love You” stage, which was only a few feet away!

More about the festival…. after I take a nap!