How to have a COOL festival.

If any of you attended the Cantaloupe Festival yesterday in Tarboro, you know it was HOT!   Too hot for the vendors and way too hot for the crowds who huddled under any small patch of shade they could find.

So .... this, of course, got me looking for solutions.  Our July and August (and maybe September) events face the same possibility of high heat and bright sun, so how to we keep things cool?

We don't have to just accept the roasting temperatures, there are many options that we can incorporate to have a "cooler" event. Actually there are three factors we need to take into consideration.  Shade, breeze and hydration.

The shade can be as simple as hand-held parasols and garden umbrellas, to large shade sails and canopies.  I asked about rental prices for shade "tents" from Tar River Rentals and the tent that covered yesterday's stage was $225.00 for the weekend.  With those kind of prices, and since we'll use things monthly, we may want to consider purchasing what we need rather than renting.  We may be able to produce some relatively effective shade with a couple of large blue tarps, strong rope and some ingenuity.

As I explored the web for solutions I discovered that "crowd cooling" is a much discussed topic.  The most popular and seemingly effective way to drop temperatures by as much as 25 degrees, is with misting.  Again, this can be as simple as cheap hand-held mist bottles or battery-operated misting fans, to the larger hose type systems.  Mists can come from above or be ground misting hoses with fans blowing the cooled air.  It sounds like a great concept, something we should explore further.

Fans make the breeze and breeze cools the skin so more fans or bigger fans are needed.  We have a wide range of options here, too, from hand held paper fans to giant blowers. Some fans actually have the additional option of misting. 

Right now, as Grassroots organizers, we need to look at the necessity of crowd cooling for summer-time festival planning in North Carolina from 2 perspectives. 1) what kind of systems can we put in place to make all of our hot-weather T2S events comfortable and therefore ATTRACTIVE? (as in attracting more people to town).  2) what can we do in the next 2 weeks to make our very cool Steampunk July 12th event more COOL?  

Money is a factor that must be taken into consideration as our funds and access to funds is limited.  Perhaps we can get products donated or get businesses to sponsor us and help cover expenses.  As always, your suggestions are most appreciated.