Tin van to top tour van - Band 'Daughters of Davis' tell their tale!
This story happened on: 12/11/2013
Hello fellow Club Together members,
It's great to join you! My name is Fern and together with my sister Adrienne we make up acoustic soul folk duo, Daughters of Davis. If you made it to the NEC in Birmingham for the caravan & motorhome show this year you may have seen us play at the Caravan Club stand! Well tonight is our first night in our brand new tour van; the Elddis Accordo, which today we officially christened Otis..it is a van of beauty and quite rightly why it deserves the title 'The soul legend of the roads'! Today we took away the van to stay at the friendly Durham Grange, Official Caravan Club Site and it is an understatement to say that we are uncontainably excited..but for more reasons than you might expect.. Let me tell you a little about my sister and I..
In 2011 we pretty much gave our all to hit the road in pursuit of our musical ambitions. I sold my car and Adrienne quit her job working in Occupational Therapy. We did many car boot sales in the rain, I decorated a house & we scraped together the money to get a van off Ebay, which we lived and toured in for nearly 2 years practically living off of porridge & noodles alone. It was a rusty tin on wheels; we got baked in the summer, froze in the winter and had to ward off many spider attacks. Despite the many difficulties and van breakdown setbacks it was a triumph in our music journey, seeing us get signed to Storm 5 Management in Sheffield, make an album and a feature length DVD documenting our travels. Gigging highlights included playing pitchside at Birmingham City FC, St Andrews Stadium to 17'000 people and supporting Alison Moyet at The London Royal Opera House, and more recently playing live on Radio 2 and BBC South Today.
Sadly despite our efforts the van couldn't keep up with us and an MOT revealed the repairs were worth more than the van itself! We thought living in a van was bad until we traded in the scrap value of it for a car and tried living out of that. It was bag chaos and not a sustainable endeavour we have to say! This is where Elddis and The Caravan Club stepped in and became the tour heroes, sponsoring us with a shiney brand new van so that the tour could continue in 'freedom with flare'!
So tonight as we sit in the cosy heat (thanks to Whale..also super generously sponsoring our fuel for the tour!) watching our Avtex TV/DVD player fitted by David Whitehead's fair hand (manager at Elddis), eating our favourite chocolate supplied by the lovely & thoughtful Rachel Moncrieff (marketing & communications - Elddis) we appreciate these luxury more than you could imagine. Not only can we sleep in peace and feel our toes, but we have been shown so much kindness and support from Elddis and The Caravan Club, we have even more reasons to continue the tour in high spirits with great friends we've met along the way!
We also reflect upon the last 24hours; road testing the van, jamming in its quarters and our inspiring visit to the Elddis factory, where Rob Quine (MD of Elddis) showed us the place where motorhomes are born and dreams come true : ) it really has been a magical day!
We'll keep blogging on here regularly as we tour the country gigging, letting you know how we get on in all our van adventures! So please keep a look out and stay in touch, we'd love to hear from you and maybe we can share some traveling tips! We've got a good catalogue of stories from our old van on what 'not' to do, maybe you have some advice on things that work! We're on all the usual too facebook.com/daughtersofdavis twitter: daughters_davis
We look forward to hearing from you!
Much love
Daughters of Davis
Xx
brue
Motorhomer