How to Find Lost Friends at a Festival

It happens to everybody. You know the feeling: that unmistakable “Oh shit, where the hell is ____?!?” feeling that happens when you get disoriented at a festival and find out a member of your fun-loving crew is drowning in an ocean of kraze-mazing kandi kids. The good news is they’ll probably make four new friends in the time it takes you to find them. But assuming the goal is to enjoy the bands, bass and booty-shaking together, here are six tips for finding lost friends at a festival:

Double down on contact info

Get a phone number, and make sure you’ve friended all the members of your group on Facebook or Instagram. You may even consider a messaging app to have an additional means of communicating together. Bottom line: Get multiple ways to communicate, so you can have better odds of reaching a friend. For instance, getting the phone numbers of a couple gives you twice the odds later of reaching them, because everybody knows couples are joined at the hip.

Have a rendezvous point

You don’t necessarily have to synchronize watches, but it’s always a bright idea to know where to find people. If you don’t want to walk all the way back to your car camp alone, pick an emergency regroup spot that is easy to locate—like the left-hand side of the merch booth, in line at the water stand or some place at the base of a giant art structure that can be seen from far away. The idea is to have a landmark, and a specific point at that landmark, that can be found easily.

Use an illuminated signal (like a flashlight)

The hard truth is that when it gets dark in a crowd, it can be tough to discern faces. Knowing to look for the red flashlight can make it much easier to locate each other. Since many folks bring flashlights, I like to find a signaling spot, like a tree, stage or piece of signage, to point it at. Alternatively, you can learn a few letters of Morse code to authenticate yourself to friends. Just keep in mind that it’s easy to get carried away with all the flashlight fun; you might become annoying if you’re not careful, and you don’t want to be that guy.

Use a festival app

Some festival apps will take the guesswork out of finding friends for you, but not all are created equal. The problem with most is that cellular connectivity remains lackluster at festivals, rendering these apps less useful. On the upside, when they do work it’s incredibly convenient. At some festivals, this is the best way to swoop up a lost friend with enough time to catch the end of Dillon Francis’ set.

If you’re going to text, time-stamp!

Cellular networks get maxed, meaning that text you just sent is probably going to hit your BFF’s phone in about two hours. Awesome, right? One way to deal with this issue is to time-stamp your texts. “I’m in line at Urban Pie. It’s 2:30 pm.” This may seem like extra work, but when you’re lost it’s helpful to know if a message is outdated. And if three or four arrive at once (because you somehow lucked upon a pocket of reception), you’ll know which message to follow. Time-stamping saves a buddy from waiting when they don’t have to be, and it spares you from searching forever.

Plan ahead

For when all else fails, have one place and time to meet in advance—that one set everyone agrees simply cannot be missed. In other words, plan ahead. When you have five stages to choose from and dozens of other sites to see, it can be overwhelming trying to find someone, and the last thing anyone wants is to miss out on the fun. So, why not make that must-see Eric Prydz performance a scheduled engagement? While emergency rendezvous are great in a pinch, planning ahead eases the worry about separating to accommodate different musical preferences.

If any one of these tips seems helpful, just imagine using them all together! That’s really the secret here. Everyone knows to use their phone to try and find a buddy, but by using all these tips in tandem, the odds of finding your friend go way up. Ultimately, some festivals are easier to locate people in than others, but at the end of the day, the thunderous bass and futuristic lasers that make these places so memorable really is a dish that is best enjoyed when shared.

To find out where Graham is right now, catch him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.