You are brave. I used to live close to the downtown area in a small but thriving college town in Kansas. In the summertime, there would be free concerts downtown which were loud but ended at 10 or 11 pm. It was the bar patrons (AKA college students) walking home after the bars had closed talking and laughing loudly that happened on the regular.
I don't live there and do not miss it one bit.
Hopefully the purchase price was made more affordable due to the twice yearly festivals. (I am not much of a festival/large gather kind of gal.)
This weekend, I found the people arriving home after the festival were much more annoying and noisy than the festival itself.
I don't think so, though this weekend I noticed we barely hear the festival. It will depend on the wind direction ofcourse, but we lost no sleep over the festival sounds atleast. Just the people coming back home, but we live on a recreational park, so there's always the chance of bad/noisy neighbours for a week or two. The upside is they will leave once their vacation is over, while we remain behind in this beautiful place :-)
Neither am I and we mostly avoid it as much as possible. The only real exception for me are fantasy festivals/fairs. Sure they're busy aswell, but the people there are just different. The atmosphere is much more friendly, people keep the place clean (seems they actually use trashcans), there are many people in awesome costumes and the music is good.