Post It from Wolvey Villa Farm Campsite, Wolvey, Warwickshire 16th June 2013.

We were pleasantly surprised with our journey through central London to visit our son and his partner in the heart of Islington and drop off a few bottles of Spanish wine and some French cheese and pate before they flew off abroad themselves. It was the Queens official birthday and traffic was not as heavy as we expected and we managed to get there with easy, albeit it taking an hour to cover the 11 or so miles. The biggest surprise was a gap in the on street parking directly outside their apartments and an even bigger one that I could parallel park our 7.5 meter motorhome into it first time. I would not have able to have done that at the start of our holiday so all the 3000+ miles of driving had been of some additional benefit.

Our visit, though short, was a well worth detour and to see them both again and spend time having lunch and catching up was good. The gifts were well received and I was pleased to receive a trilogy of books to read for my Father’s Day present.

We set off up the M1 in terrible rain on our journey to Wolvey Villa Farm, a commercial campsite close to where some friends live and the purpose of choosing here was to visit them. We were booked in for two nights and had requested a hard standing. The site was on the edge of a small village, in Warwickshire, and had a small fishing pond with lots of ducks. Our pitch was directly across the road from the pond and toilet block facilities so Smokee had the birds for entertainment. It was not long before we had a number of people coming to the van to ask if we had a cat with us. One child asked if we lived in Bessie and were we Gypsies, presumably because we travelled with Smokee.

The facilities were basic and suitable for our purposes, the site overall was quite large with a lot of grassed pitches marked out by a small paving slab set into the well-tended grass. Being a working farm there were also some animals, donkeys and horses, for the children to see.

I had a surprise when I went to wash the tea pots as hot water had to be paid for at the sink and in the showers, but this was very minimal at 10p and 20p and the cost of £16 a night with electric I suppose answered the question why there was a charge. A chat with the elderly site owner when I went to get change revealed he was surprised we had never paid extra for hot water anywhere we had been both here and abroad and I made a point of letting him know our cheapest site of the holiday was around £9.33 at the municipal site in Orthez, France.

A big surprise upon arriving was seeing an old work friend with their caravan a few feet from our pitch, they were on their way to Cornwall and were stopping off for a couple of nights like us so we had an enjoyable time catching up over a cup of tea once we had got set up. The friends we had come to visit also called later that first night and we planned our Sunday together and a much desired Sunday lunch with lots of vegetables at a pub in Hinckley.

The Sunday lunch was heaven, roast beef with all the trimmings washed down with a couple of pints of Marston’s Pedigree. We had a good time catching up and did a bit of shopping for essentials for our return home on the Monday. A very pleasant end to our first foreign jaunt with Bessie.

Regards, Roy