Category Archives: Campervan

Watching the clock

I’ve written several times about my enthusiasm for the Apple Watch, but even eight years after getting my first one, I’m still discovering uses for it.

We’ve spent the last few nights in our campervan on a delightful small campsite in Devon.

Picture of campervan in a bucolic setting

There are loo and shower facilities in a nearby building but, unusually these days, you do need to insert a pound coin if you want to use the shower. It’s a fine shower, and I didn’t mind paying, but since the meter is outside in the corridor, you don’t get any warning before the water shuts off suddenly after six minutes, possibly leaving you rather soapy…

So even in this low-tech environment, where we treat an electricity supply as something of a luxury, there’s great benefit to be derived from a waterproof watch which can be instructed, with a couple of clicks or a spoken command, to warn you shortly before your shower is going to finish!

Too busy living’ it…

I remember in the early days of blogging, I was trying to persuade a good friend of mine that he would be capable of writing a really interesting blog, and his response was something along the lines of ‘Too busy living it to blog it!’ I wasn’t quite sure what to think of that. Was it an enviable, or pitiable, state?

My posts on Status-Q (now approaching its 21st birthday) have always been somewhat bursty and sporadic, and I notice that it’s nearly a month since my last one. I sometimes feel inferior to friends who produce impressive output every single week or even day (though I suppose many of them are not so much writing new content themselves as linking to valuable pieces elsewhere, which is something I generally tend to do a bit less because they do it much better than me!)

So blogging for me is something that generally happens when I have enough interesting stuff going on to write about, but not so much that there’s no time to write! My long-suffering readers just put up with the unpredictability. And this last month has been surprisingly busy, both with work and play, but a lot of the latter… so here are a few quick phone snaps and bits of news, to catch up…

Big boats…

Since the last post, Rose and I went on an RYA sailing course – the first for her and the second for me – and spent a few days living aboard a very fine 35ft boat. Here’s Rose at the helm, heading out to sea:

and we also enjoyed some night sailing on the River Stour:

And little boats…

At the other extreme we’ve been exploring the North Norfolk coast and its challenging tidal currents in our little inflatable boat with its electric outboard, getting up very early to set out with enough water from Morston Quay…

:

Popping out to see the seals on Blakeney Point:

before heading back inland towards Blakeney…

with the help of local signposts:

…and passing some of the pleasing local craft on the way.

Blakeney high street, which we had wandered down to a favourite restaurant the previous night…

was now our destination port…

and such is the height of the spring tide down at the quay that we could just sail into the carpark and tie up to a bollard there.

The quay soon became crowded with people enjoying jumping in to the warm, voluminous and fast-flowing river, which normally meanders much more sedately through substantial banks of mud and sand.

We walked back along the coast path to Morston, picked up the car, and brought it back to Blakeney, had a coffee and sausage roll for breakfast at the nearby cafe. After that, the rapidly-drying car park was once again full of cars, and we could roll up the boat and take it away.

Tesla travel

Of course, if you’re staying in a campsite, but your car is full of spaniels, boats and outboards, then transporting a tent can be a challenge. I do have a roof rack I can put on the Tesla, but I wasn’t too keen on attaching a heavy tent to my glass roof, nor on the likely effects of the resulting aerodynamics on my range.

Then I remembered that I had once bought a custom-made bag to go on our bike-rack when I was using it with our old campervan. It turned out to be a great way to transport the tent.

When we got to the campsite we removed it and had a normal (albeit boat-filled) car for the rest of the weekend. As always when attaching things to my towbar, though, I did need to adopt a slightly unusual position when using a supercharger on the way home!

An old design with new opportunities?

Next to us in the campsite was a rather interesting folding caravan. We made friends with the owner and discovered that it was a Carousel Slimline, a jolly clever design originating in the 70s and produced, in Norfolk, until just a few years ago. They look like this:

The slimline version of the Gobur Carousel.

Now, if you’re thinking that it looks a bit, well, boxy, remember… that’s what you really want when you’re living inside it. Houses are boxy too. Flat vertical walls and high ceilings are desirable, but you normally have to compromise them because of things like aerodynamics when you’re towing behind a car at high speeds. Not with this.

We were rather impressed, and since the company was just a few miles from the campsite, we went and had a look. They even let me try towing one on the Tesla… which worked very well.

For those interested, I got about 3 miles per kWh on my 18-mile test, as compared to about 4 miles/kWh normally. If that was representative for longer journeys, I would still get over 200 miles before recharging, which is just fine!

Turning this trailer into a liveable space takes about 3 minutes, which is rather clever: consider, for example, the fact that the van contains a wardrobe, and kitchen units, and that the folding point is lower then the kitchen worktops… Here’s how it works.

Sadly, new ones are no longer being built, but some enterprising former employees have got together and have an impressive collection of models available which they buy, recondition, service, resell and so forth. We were both impressed and tempted, but have resisted that temptation… so far.

Here’s the thing, though: there’s a real opportunity for designs like this in the world of electric cars. These are both light and streamlined, and even the slimline one gives you a lot more living space then some other alternatives like the Eriba Puck, the GoPod or some of the sexy teardrop-shaped options on the market. There’s an opportunity for an investor here, I think, to keep a classic alive and to market it as the EV-friendly caravan option for the future.

And lastly…

Combining the themes of boats and electric propulsion, I’m in danger of boring some of my friends by telling them how wonderful I think electric outboard motors are. (I’ve put lots more on one of my YouTube playlists if you’re interested, though.)

But yesterday, my friend Douglas and I sailed our little dinghy down the River Blackwater from the very friendly and welcoming sailing club at Stone St Lawrence and round to Brightlingsea on the River Colne. On the way, we passed the old Radio Caroline ship, which will bring back memories to UK readers of a certain age…

We made it to Brightlingsea, with a little exploration of West Mersea on the way. It’s rather fun sailing 12 miles along the edge of the North Sea in a little 12-foot boat. (That’s nautical miles, of course, so 13-and-a-bit to you landlubbers.)

The harbourmaster kindly let us tie up on the jetty while we went and got a hot chocolate at a local cafe.

Then we headed back, which we knew would have been rather a slow sail because it was into the wind, so we were planning to use the outboard, and this was made really easy by a new accessory I had just got for it. Details are here for those interested.

In the end the wind almost completely vanished, leaving us cruising silently up a glassy estuary towards the sunset as the evening came on. A very pleasant end to the day.

In summary…

It’s hard to believe that this has still, in general, been a normal working month involving lots of other things like trips to the vet, a family funeral, speccing out a solar-and-battery system for the house, lots of software development and some important deadlines for important clients. Fortunately, we’re going away at the end of next week to recover.

Who let the dogs out?

Dogs are not subject to the same lockdown restrictions as the rest of us.

They’re clearly making the most of it, and heading out for adventures in their campervans.

Spotted outside Sainsbury’s yesterday. I’m guessing they were just stocking up on sausages to go in the fridge.

A Wee Campervan Caper – Travels with Tilly

Christmas breakfast on the edge of the Cairngorms, 2019

Hello Everybody, and Happy New Year! I’ve been doing something very foolish in 2020, and now I’ve stopped.

Let me explain…

This time last year, over the Christmas and New Year period, Rose was visiting her family in the States, so after dropping her at Heathrow, I turned our little campervan around, and headed north, accompanied by my cocker spaniel. The only thing I knew at the time was that we were spending the first night in the Lakes, and that we were probably heading for Scotland. The rest would be decided en route, mostly based on the weather forecast. I’m not sure if the Dark Sky app is often used as a route planner…

Anyway, I recorded quite a large chunk of our journey with my GoPro, and came back with a ridiculous amount of video footage, some of which had technical issues to overcome, and I discovered I had a mammoth editing task on my hands. I feared it could be well into the spring before I was able to share any of it. And then we had a spring unlike any other. So then I hoped that lockdown would give me more time to work on projects like this, but actually 2020 has been really quite a busy year for me, and it was only once we got back towards Christmas again that I was actually able to devote any time to it.

“At least”, I said to myself, “I have to finish it before the end of the year.” And I did! I clicked ‘upload’ on the final episodes just before midnight last night. 🙂

Now, let’s be clear here: You’ll note I say ‘episodes’ above. There are, in fact, nine of them, and that’s after I’d edited out enough material for at least four more! This is perhaps the most extreme let-me-bore-you-with-my-holiday-snaps variant one can come up with, and I don’t expect the average Status-Q reader to be interested in watching one, let alone nine of these little narratives.

An AirBnB for New Year’s Eve, December 2019
The van is visible in the bottom right. Click for a larger version.

Amazingly, though, there are people who will enjoy my holiday snaps! Some are watching already.

Those longing for the open road amidst Covid restrictions, or those planning their next motorhome trip in more normal times, do like to get ideas for their next adventure, or relive the memories of journeys past, and road trip videos are very popular on YouTube. I’ve watched a lot of them, and some were partly responsible for me buying the van in the first place.

That’s before you get into the experiences, hints and tips of the full-time motorhomers: try searching YouTube for ‘van life’ if you want to enter another world.

But, even though producing this has, in some ways, been a burden that I wanted to get off my shoulders for a whole year, it’s also been a joy. Rewatching my holiday several times over means that some of the best bits are burned into my memory; there are sites, sounds and places that I would otherwise have forgotten in a month, and that I’ll now remember for ever.

And, in the unlikely event that you want to experience any of it too, there’s a YouTube playlist, and the journey begins here:

Social distancing in Norfolk

Yesterday, we took the day off and went to the North Norfolk coast. Maintaining social distancing wasn’t too hard. And Tilly got lots of exercise.

That old pipeline that runs out along across one of our favourite beaches has clearly seen some action in the past:

Rose said this looks like two friends embracing across a fence:

And at times, sections of the pipe emerge like a sea monster from the deep:

Here you might be walking on fresh samphire…

or crunching on cockle shells.

It was great to return to a place we’ve visited often and always enjoy.

(I posted a rather different photo from here on a previous visit.)


Now, you may well be asking, how did you manage this, when almost everything is closed? This particular beach is about an hour and three-quarters’ drive from Cambridge, and that poses some challenges when it comes to… ahem… the need for a comfort break.

Well, the answer is that we’re fortunate enough to have a small campervan.

We can’t use it for any overnight stays at present, but it does make a jolly good vehicle for day trips. It has a fridge, a table, a stove, fresh water…

And it also has a loo. Sort of. Even in a van this size. Now, we don’t often use the loo, because we usually stay on sites that have such facilities, and, well, frankly, a loo that you have to pull out of a cupboard before use isn’t that much of a ‘convenience’. Sometimes we leave it behind, because the cupboard space is more useful, and when we have used it in the past, it generally goes in a little loo tent we pitch beside the van.

Having said, that, these facilities have come a long way since the more primitive equivalents I remember from my youth. Ours is Thetford Excellence, in case you’re interested, and it’s remarkably civilised. All the necessary seals are good, modern chemicals do a good job, it incorporates a loo roll holder and even, would you believe, an electric flush! There are some places I never expected to install AA batteries… but it works well. We probably wouldn’t have chosen quite such a luxurious one, but it came with the van.

Anyway, the point is that this does, pretty much single-handedly, enable day trips during lockdown. “Would you like to take the dog for a short walk, dear? I’m just going to draw the curtains…”


Anyway, back to the beaches. The Norfolk beaches we visit are never crowded, but the car parks can be, so we made sure we arrived early. By the time we departed, a couple of hours later, somebody was grateful for our space.

We had lunch in a different car park, at Blakeney. There was still plenty of space here.

We managed to get a takeaway coffee and cake from a favourite spot in Holt which does an awfully good job of both, and then headed for a rather different beach at Weybourne in the afternoon.

Here, you’re walking on pebbles, which is not quite so easy, but they’re beautiful none the less.

We always bring some of the more colourful pebbles or shells back from our seaside trips, and they end up decorating the bird-bath in the garden.

Talking of birds, there were lots of happy ones bobbing about.

And there are suitably picturesque scenes to be snapped even from the car park.

The standard way to get one of these boats over a pebbly beach into the sea, by the way, is to attach a small accessory.

It’s basically a big chunk of ferric oxide with a diesel engine.

Anyway, all in all, a very pleasant day, and, being aware of the hardship many others are going through at present, I was enormously lucky to be able to enjoy it in such a versatile vehicle with my two favourite companions.

A remote dawn

Around Christmas and New Year, I was in Scotland in my campervan. I took lots of video footage. Far too much, in fact, so I’ve been gradually working my way through it, on and off, for several months. This evening, I came across this rather pleasing scene. It’s just a still frame captured from video, and on a GoPro too, so the quality’s not great, but I hope you enjoy the view!

This is a dawn dog-walk at Uig on the Isle of Lewis, on New Year’s Eve. Not only was I up at dawn, I had already breakfasted and was setting off for a hike! However, this sounds a bit less impressive when I point out that sunrise in mid-winter up there is after 9am.

The small black blur on the right-hand side, which you may be able to see if you click for a larger version, is Tilly romping in the heather.

Pannellum in Pittenweem

I’ve had fun in the last year or so playing with spherical cameras (often known as 360-degree cameras) and I’ve posted a few on here. But they’ve always had a problem: you really need a plugin to view them, which is untidy. This one of the Sacré-Coeur, for example, relies on a plugin from the Ricoh site.

So I’ve been delighted to discover Matthew Petroff’s Panellum, a panorama viewer created using just HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and WebGL, which means it runs in most modern browsers natively.

Here’s an example from Pittenweem, a favourite spot I discovered on my campervan trip over Christmas, just north of Edinburgh.

You can drag the image around to look in different directions, and you can zoom in and out by scrolling, or using Shift & Ctrl keys.

On my early experiments, it seems to work very well, even on my fairly elderly laptop. It even has a full-screen button…

So you may be seeing a few more of these here in the near future!

Eyes in the back of my head

Just before Christmas, Tilly (my spaniel) and I went to the Dordogne and back in our campervan. I made a video about it, which, while it may be of interest only to travel vlog and ‘van life’ enthusiasts, does have a bit of novelty value, because I filmed it on a spherical (360-degree) camera.

This means that after you’ve watched it, you can go back and watch it again from a completely different angle and see what was happening behind you!

I’ll put the link here, rather than embedding it, because this is something you want to watch on the YouTube site. Or, better still, in the YouTube app on your tablet, or phone, or VR headset…

You can find the video here.

If I had had more time, I would have made it shorter 🙂

This was really just an experiment for me, and I learned a great deal about the challenges and opportunities of filming and editing this particular medium, which I may write about in due course.

What a difference a day makes…

The sky over my campsite yesterday morning; I hadn’t seen any blue up there for quite some time!

Camping Lune-sur-le-Lac

And the sky over the same campsite as I returned to it in the evening:

Camping Lune-sur-le-Lac

My pitch was just under the darkest bit at the bottom right.

It soon settled down to the standard grey rainclouds again afterwards, though!

Linced-In

We went to Lincolnshire last weekend. When I told some friends of our plans beforehand, they said, “Lincolnshire? Really? For a whole weekend?”, or words to that effect. And I must confess to being somewhat apprehensive myself, though we had visited Lincoln itself before and knew that to be a lovely city.

But there’s lots of good stuff in Lincolnshire.

Lincoln Cathedral

They have some very impressive churches, for one thing. In addition to Lincoln Cathedral (above), we visited Boston, from where some people once set sail to found a colony in Massachusetts.

Boston’s name comes from “Botolph’s Town”, and the church of St Botolph is almost a cathedral itself.

It’s been informally known as the ‘Boston Stump‘ for the last, oh, seven hundred years or so, a name which hardly conveys the fact that it’s really awfully tall. We can assert this, having climbed it, via a very narrow staircase. They let us in at the bottom and shut the door behind us; the only way was up…

Emerging at the top, you can walk around the rather narrow walkway with a lowish handrail, before descending via a second similar staircase.

A fun and very memorable experience, but definitely not recommended for those suffering from corpulence, claustrophobia, or vertigo!

Lincoln itself is built on quite a steep hill, but much of the county is very flat, so Lincolnshire’s drainage ditches are almost as impressive as its churches.

There are lots of marvellous windmills, used both for pumping and for corn-grinding.

And here’s another cool thing you don’t find in every county: a bubble-car museum!

We visited a lovely beach at Huttoft, as the sun was setting.

Tilly did feel, however, that they had rather too many seagulls, so did her best to rectify that problem.

We stayed at “Long Acres“, a delightful and well-run campsite which suffers only from not being very close to most of the major attractions. As a result it’s very peaceful, especially at this time of the year. And if you enjoy looking at bubble-cars as much as we do, they at least are not far away!

I haven’t talked about the quaint teashop we visited in the pretty village of Tealby, or The Usher Gallery in Lincoln, or the Sibsey Trader Windill… But all in all, we had a very enjoyable weekend in our trusty campervan.

Accessories for our VW Bilbo’s Nexa T5 Campervan

This is definitely one of those ‘just in case you’re Googling for it’ posts!

Regular readers will know that in the spring, we bought a campervan: a 3-year old Bilbo’s Nexa based on a long-wheelbase VW T5, and we’ve had great fun with it so far. You can read more about it in an earlier post.

A common temptation amongst new van owners is to purchase far too many accessories immediately and then use only a fraction of them, a temptation that we, surprisingly for us, managed mostly to resist. But there are a few things we’ve been particularly pleased with, and some of them were chosen after extensive research, so I thought a list might be useful to others. They range from the only-useful-for-Bilbos-Nexa to the handy-for-any-campervan variety!

So, in no particular order…

Hailo one-step stool

This makes climbing in and out of the van just that bit easier, especially if you’re on sloping ground and your door is higher than usual because of levelling ramps. It doesn’t provide a huge amount of height, but it also folds up nice and small.

We got ours from Amazon.

Levelling ramps with chocks

Perhaps the bulkiest thing that everyone needs to carry is a set of levelling ramps. We got the Fiamma ones, which work fine, but I imagine others are much the same. What I do recommend, though, is getting the chocks to go with them, or making yourself something similar, even though they’re a bit fiddly.

Why? Well, on most VW vans, when you want to rotate the driver’s seat to face backwards, you need to let off the handbrake. You can put the van in gear (or in ‘park’) before doing so, so you’re not going to roll anywhere very far, but if you’re up on ramps, you’ll probably roll far enough to lose a noticeable chunk of your carefully-adjusted height! Chocks are the solution.

Using them is rather tricky, of course, if you’re on your own, but, in that situation, you may not care so much about rotating the driver’s seat anyway.

Jerba Midge screens

Visiting Scotland over the summer, we decided we would need some midge-free ventilation. Midges are pretty tiny, and some flyscreens won’t keep them out.

We bought a pair of these from Jerba, who are based in Scotland, so we figured they should know what they were doing. And they did. Check with them for the precise details for your windows, though; you do want them to fit well!

For more general ventilation in hot weather, we also got some of these from Brandrup for the front windows. They’re bulky, a bit inconvenient to carry, and slightly tricky to install. But they do have the advantage of providing ventilation while maintaining security – occasionally useful when leaving the dog in the van.

Breathable Awning Groundsheet

Whether or not you actually have an awning, when the ground gets wet, you’ll probably want some sort of a doormat between you and the mud. When we rented a van before buying, it came with some of this permeable rubber mat, which really proved its worth after a few rainy nights, so we asked them what it was and where to get it.

The rain goes through it, rather than forming puddles; you can have a large area and still fold it up small; it’s easy to hose down afterwards; and, apparently, some campsites only let you pitch things if you have a groundsheet that won’t kill the grass in the process. This meets that criterion too.

There are lots of sources for similar stuff, but we were pleased with the sheet we got from eBay. It even matched the van!

Khyam Toilet Tent

Our van does have a loo, but it’s in a cupboard and you have to pull it out to use it. On the rare occasions when we’ve stayed at sites without WC facilities, we prefer to have a slightly less intimate arrangement!

You can buy cheaper loo tents than Khyam’s one, but theirs is very well made and easy to put up, and I have no regrets about spending a bit more. We found that using our portable loo in it was a much more civilised experience than we’d expected.

Telescopic ladder

On our longer summer trip, we were carrying things like kayak paddles, awnings, chairs and loo tents, so we decided to use a roof rack and roof bag. One challenge when compared to car travel, though, is that our roof is two metres off the ground, and while was possible to reach it by, say, standing on the tyres, life became very much easier once we got one of these.

After we returned, we also found this was a lot easier to move around the house than any of our other ladders! A handy piece of kit.

Outwell Wash Base

One thing that’s changed since my childhood camping days is the availability of a huge range of collapsible implements made of silicon rubber. We have a collapsible kettle for using on the gas ring, for example (though at most sites we have electric hook-up and so use this rather sweet little electric kettle).

But my favourite is this combined bucket, washing-up bowl and draining board, which comes in a range of different colours, collapses to be almost flat, and does its job very nicely. Ours is a more subtle cream colour! One unexpected benefit of the silicon feet is that, when collapsed, it doesn’t slip around, to the extent that we just leave it out on the worktop when driving. There’s a helpful video about them here.

Water-tank adapter

Here’s a small, expensive piece of blue plastic. What is it and why would you want one? Or why, at least, would the owner of a Bilbo’s campervan want one?

Well…

One slight eccentricity of Bilbo’s campervans is that they have the fresh-water filling point on the inside. I’ve heard various explanations for this: it reduces the likelihood of accidentally putting diesel in your water tank, it reduces the chance of freezing in low temperatures, and so on, but I suspect it’s chiefly down to a much simpler installation process.

It does mean, though, that filling up with water involves pointing a hose at the inside of your van, and if you’re on your own, managing to keep this in the hole and avoid spillage while you go and turn the tap on or off can sometimes be a challenge.

This little widget, which I think the seller produces in small quantities using a 3D printer, lets you connect up the hose and then holds it in place, and keeps the water pointing in the right direction!

As an aside, my hose has a stop valve on one end of it, which only lets water through once something is connected. Very handy. I bought the hose ready-made, without noticing this, and it caused me some confusion until I worked out what was going on!

Since it’s only on one end, it can also cause some surprises if you connect this end to the tap, thinking that the other end is blocked off…

Aquasorb Towels

In a small van, it can be a challenge getting things dry, especially if, like us, you tend not to spend much time relaxing at the campsite, but instead are always on the move! So wet towels were a bit of a problem, until we discovered these.

They are really intended for dogs, but, having bought one for Tilly, I thought I’d just try it in the shower myself, before she got to use it. We immediately went and bought two more for ourselves.

These are not big fluffy luxurious things in which to wrap yourself. They are more like a kind of super-absorbent imitation chamois leather. You rub yourself down, wring it out, and repeat until you’re dry enough. But they take almost no space in the van, and, best of all, they are meant to be put back in their sealed containers while still moist. So the whole problem of what to do with the wet towels goes away.

Update, a couple of months later: Oh yes, and these are absolutely fabulous for removing condensation from the inside of your windows, too!

OXO Compact Dustpan and Brush

Tiny, cheap, well made, and it does the job nicely. Not much else to say!

Available from many places including Amazon.

Lap trays

Now, I tend to think of lap trays as something for the old folks’ home rather than for the campsite, but we got a couple of these ones from the delightfully-named gift shop ‘Not Another Bunch of Flowers‘, and they’ve been excellent in the van.

We use them whenever we don’t have the table up, when we’re sitting outside, or when for some reason we just want a little bit more solid, flat space on which to put things.

I also like the fact that they don’t have cats, flowers or Constable landscapes on them, which makes me feel a bit less old.

Outdoor chairs

It’s always nice to be able to sit outside, but chairs can be a nuisance to carry around, unless you have a VW California, which has handy storage for them in the tailgate.

We ended up going for Kampa Cocktail chairs, which are a bit lower than we might otherwise have chosen, but have the benefit of being really quite compact when folded.

Bilbo’s Nexa owners, in particular, might like to know that we bought them after considerable research to find something that would fit into the Nexa’s wardrobe, without simultaneously being so small as to have you sitting on the floor!

They are fairly low, though – we really need to find a small low table to go beside them for the G&T.

Outwell Feast Saucepans

Lastly — for now, at least — we needed some pots and pans, and we’ve been very pleased with this little set.

The handles unscrew, and it all stacks together in a very small space, whilst feeling reassuringly solid once assembled.

So there you are – those are some of our favourites after the first six months or so. Hope they’re useful to somebody out there!

A Man with a Van

A few months ago, we made our biggest and most expensive purchase ever (excluding houses, that is). And yet, it is almost a house, sort of, in a small way…

We bought a campervan. Or, to be more precise, we bought a three-year-old Bilbo’s Nexa, based on a long wheelbase VW T5 Transporter.

This is something we’d considered for some time. We had borrowed a friend’s (rather larger) van for a few long weekends, and we had also rented a smaller one for four nights in the spring. On each occasion, we joked about the luxury Bed & Breakfast establishments we were driving past in order to go and stay in a field! On the other hand, we came back from each one having had an enjoyable adventure, and having seen the world from slightly different angles than we would otherwise have done.

Another reason for initial hesitation, of course, is that these things are terrifyingly expensive, especially if you get one that’s even vaguely new. The small vans based on the VW Transporters command a particular premium, partly because it’s such a good base vehicle, partly because the builders have to work harder to pack everything inside, and partly because it can also double-up as your everyday vehicle if you need it to. (At just under 2 metres tall, for example, these can be driven into almost any car park, including multi-storey ones.) The only thing that allowed us to consider such an extravagant purchase is the fact that they depreciate more slowly than almost any other vehicle you can buy. After a few years you can sell one for almost as much as you paid for it, especially if it’s from a respected company, and, in the UK, Bilbo’s have been doing these van conversions successfully for more than four decades.

I suspect that half our friends think we’re mad and the other half are envious. But if this isn’t a mode of transport you’ve tried or even considered, I should explain that there are almost as many different ways of approaching campervanning as there are people doing it.

For some, it’s a way of entertaining the kids by getting them out of a crowded city suburb, so they head for the big campsites where it’s easy to park large vans near to tumble dryers, playgrounds, and sometimes even swimming pools.

In our case, we usually want the opposite: a key thing we’re looking for is peace and quiet. This means that we tend to aim for smaller sites, typically with fewer than 10 pitches; a few of them are even adult-only.

The trade-off is that these tend to have fewer facilities; some are little more than a field with a tap and some electric hook-up points. We do have a portable loo in the van, with a fine loo tent we can pitch when needed, and it turns out that these have been refined over the years to be really quite civilised; it hasn’t been an issue for us at all. But a good shower is definitely nice to have, and vans the size of ours don’t come equipped with such things. So we tend to make sure, when on the road, that we stay somewhere with showers at least every other night!

In the UK, these small sites are known as Certificated Sites (or Certificated Locations), if they’re inspected periodically by one of the two big clubs, but there are many independent ones too, and there are thousands to choose from, so finding one you like is not too hard. We’ve passed through some that were fine as a one night stop but that we wouldn’t particularly choose to revisit, and others where we’ve had a delightful time, and have already returned to more than once, even in the limited time we’ve been doing this.

The big sites can also be fine – a favourite of ours is the Camping Club one at Sandringham – but we’ve only stayed there out of season and out of school holidays, when there are large areas of empty space (and often clusters of trees) between you and the next occupant, and yet just a short grassy stroll to plentiful showers and dishwashing facilities.

For those who say that it’s not real camping, I would agree, but I also enjoy the fact that we can pitch up, pull fresh milk from our fridge and be enjoying a cup of tea while we they’re still unpacking their tent-poles. For those who wonder why we don’t get a bigger and more comfortable van (which we could easily do for the same price), I would point out that our aim at present is exploration more than relaxation: we want to get to our location and be able to drive around the local sites without worrying about parking spaces, height barriers, low tree branches etc.

We’ve just come back from a wonderful two-week trip which took us up the west coast of England and Scotland to spend a few nights staying with friends near Arisaig, and then back down the east coast visiting places like Lindisfarne (Holy Island). Here we are on the causeway out to the island, on one of the two damp days we had on the whole trip:

(This road is underwater at high tide, so you need to time your visits carefully.)

In general, though, I expect most of our trips will be of shorter duration. For me, part of the fun is just having a vehicle with a fridge, table and gas hob in it, so that you can have lunch almost anywhere you find a good view.

This is a small car park on the shores of Lake Windermere – we had just come back from a swim: it’s a changing-room too!

I’ve no idea whether this will be a lifelong obsession, or just something we enjoy for a couple of years before going back to luxury B&Bs 🙂 But it’s fun at the moment!

Update after a few months: I’ve also now made a list of some of the accessories we’ve found to work particularly well for us; you can find it here.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser