Post It from Caravan Club site at Black Horse Farm, Kent, Sunday 14th April 2013

 Well today we finally set off on our very first proper holiday in the new motorhome, Bessie as my wife has named her. The destination was Murcia Province in Spain and then a pleasurable journey back through France allowing time to stop and enjoy life. We set of from east Yorkshire at 0915, got Bessie weighed at the local docks, where we met the caravan and motorhomes returning off the North Sea Ferry to Holland or Belgium, and headed south for our first night stop at the Caravan Club site at Black Horse Farm, near Dover. It was a good decision to buy a van with a larger payload as we had everything we wanted to take and even had 200 kg to spare. Had we bought smaller then we would have been overweight. The journey south was pleasantly warm and sunny but very strong southerly winds, around 25mph I think, made for a difficult drive at times. After an hours stop for lunch at Birchhangar Green services on the M11we arrived in splendid sun at 1630 to be met by very pleasant wardens who booked us into our allotted ‘ferry pitch’. This was the first time since buying the motorhome at the end of August last year that we had been able to sit down with the door open and no heating on. Each time we had been away we had encountered snow, frosts and rain so our ‘house cat’ Smokee enjoyed the new experience of sitting on the settee looking out through the fly screen door at the children playing nearby. After a pleasant meal, with my first beer after 10 weeks dieting, we enjoyed the Sunday night television and I decided about how I was going to capture our ramblings on this adventure we were undertaking and post them on Club Together. The first hurdle was how to get photos easily reduced in size to be uploaded to the Club’s site. Nothing is ever easy, as I am soon discovering with our Club software, but hopefully the effort will be worth it. In the end I could get no internet access to anything but the Club site so I shall leave it for another day. An early night for us with a leisurely rise, in time for a 1215 ferry to Calais and our first intended stop at camp site Sainte Claire in Neufchatel-en-Bray, Normandy, which we had picked from the ACSI DVD. New things we learned today; Positive, the fridge keeps really cool and our frozen food in the ice box remained well frozen. Negative, we wish the Ducato’s windscreen was tinted to help keep the heat down and how much the high winds affected our driving comfort and fuel consumption.