Here's a tax-related travel tip. Mail your return before you head out to your favorite festival.
Some of the attendees of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival's opening weekend, April 15-17, tried to fulfill their tax-filing duties. Unfortunately for them, the Coachella campground's post office is not a full-service facility.
Instead, the small operation is more of an intermediary between festival-goers and the real local post office in Indio, California, proper.
The temporary Coachella post office this year is housed in a life-sized version of a Lincoln Log cabin, according to The Orange County Register. It was put together, complete with the toy's interlocking segments, by an artist as an exhibit for a previous Coachella.
Tourists can go to the small quasi-post office, which in prior years has been in a tent, to mail items they buy at the festival back home or send postcards. But the makeshift operation couldn't guarantee that envelopes addressed to the Internal Revenue Service would get a timely-filed postmark.
"How do they have their taxes here? I don't know," Megan Hampton, the tiny post office's quasi-postmaster, told the newspaper.
Which brings me back to my opening piece of advice.
If you got an extension until Oct. 17 to file your 2015 tax return, take care of that tax task before heading to the:
- New York City Wine and Food Festival, which starts Oct. 13;
- Albuquerque, New Mexico, International Balloon Fiesta, which lifts off Oct. 1;
- Texas Renaissance Festival, with jousting and other Olde English pursuits running Oct. 8 through Nov. 27 in Todd Mission, Texas; or
- Austin City Limits Festival's final weekend, Oct. 7-9, here in my neck of the woods.
You'll enjoy your event much more without worrying about your taxes.
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