What a difference a year makes!

It was this time last year that the OH and I were sat around a pool in Cape Verde discussing travelling (work and pleasure) and the sadness we feel when we put our chocolate lab’s in kennels each time we go away.

We have both been very lucky and have travelled the world, but as we talked of holidays of old - over many glasses of vino - memories of caravanning as children brought wide smiles to our faces; plus a frown when we realised that we had seen so little of our own country.

So, as we landed on the same thought at the same time - whilst moaning about the whole airport experience - we chimed together “Let’s consider caravanning”.

Research, research and more research resulted in two trips to the NEC shows, some hard negotiation with Mercedes, multiple trips to our local caravan dealer, much trawling of Club Together discussion threads, a towing course and the outfit was finally collected and complete in early February this year.

I now sit with an aching back typing my thoughts as we have just returned from our first weekend in Polstead, Suffolk, a very nice site.

On Friday we had all the checklists and we were very pleased with ourselves as we rolled up to storage to pick-up our pride and joy.

This was short lived as I stepped out of the car and the OH ran round to the driving seat and yelped “I’ve forgotten the dog food – I’ll be back in 5” and sped off with me chuckling as I thought you had me stood in the kitchen listening to you run through those laminated checklists - I thought we had dodged a bullet as we’d realised all the bedding was still in the spare room, so we quickly scurried pillows, etc into the car.

Oh well no bedding and hungry dogs would not have been the end of the world :)

So, check, check and another check and we were finally hitched and on our way; a short 35-mile trip down the A140. This was reasonably uneventful and I was remembering all the advice from my maneuvering course – although it did not cover idiot boy racers undertaking off a slip road, which had the OH on the ceiling.

We safely arrived and negotiated a tight entrance and the warden (Greg) helped me perform a blind reverse onto the pitch and we were in, great stuff I thought – this is easy.

More check lists got us operational – well sort of as whilst cooking dinner later that evening the saucepans were sliding towards the OH and my ears rang with “you will need to sort your leveling skills out or get a new spirit level” as the dogs sat there grinning at the thought that they may see my dinner coming their way.

However, prior to getting to the evening the awning tested true love……

We had invested in a Suncamp air awning – piece of cake; or so we thought.

The feeding of the awning into the awning rail took the skill of two very experience caravanners who kindly stepped out into the rain to sort us newbies out.

They were a godsend and Steve from Essex - who was pitched next to us - kindly kept a watchful eye over us for the rest of the weekend.

This was our first taste of the “we look-out for each other” and as he kindly guided me out of the site today we left with new email addresses and caravan friends who would like to keep in touch and hopefully meet up on future travels.

The weekend was a success; all things worked in our new van, the awning came down a lot easier than it went up; but we now have a better plan for when we picth-up at our first CL in two weeks – and we can’t wait.

“We should have done this years ago” was repeated so many times during our first weekend and we very much look forward to meeting and exploring through the coming years.