Round up of the Post Its, Tuesday 19th June 2013 from East Yorkshire.

I thought I would just round up the holiday with a few facts, comments and views about it all and the writing of the stories for the Caravan Club web site.

Overall we had been away 65 days by the time we had visited our son and friends on the way home from Dover. It had really been a big adventure for us as we had never camped at all before buying the motorhome at the end of last August and had only used it for 9 nights before we set of for Spain. I always like to know how much fuel I have used etc. when I do a journey and was pleasantly surprised that the trip computer on Bessie was very accurate when compared to my manual calculations.

Whenever possible we had used the ACSI card staying at sites for 14 or 16 Euros per night, which we thought was excellent value for money. Our cheapest campsite was the municipal at Orthez where it cost us around £9.33 for the night including all electric and tourist taxes.

We had spent many years cooking in Spain rather than eating out in an attempt to get a feeling for how it would be to live there in preparation for our retirement and we seemed to have done the same whilst away this time, getting used to our new motorhome. We actually only ate out for the main meal of the day on 9 occasions, which may account for the fact we returned home weighing pretty much the same or just less than when we left home, and if you recall we had been dieting for 10 weeks prior to the holiday. We were both very pleased with that!

Here are the stats then:

We drove a total of 3244 miles, which used 472.63 litres of diesel at an average cost of £1.29 per litre. Total cost £608.83. This made an average of 31.16 mpg which I was very impressed with as when we set off we weighed 3840 kilos and when we returned we weighed 3760 kilos. We had taken quite a lot of food out with us that we liked and knew we could not buy in Spain very easily and we brought home all our things that we had left there, including our cycles. We had only spent 10 Euros on motorway tolls and very much enjoyed the driving away from the toll motorways. Had we have gone on all the toll roads I think it would have added an extra £260 to the holiday costs and we would not have seen a lot of France in particular. We spent a total of around £2400 including everything so at about £37 a day I would say that was a bargain holiday.

We had no hic ups mechanically with the Fiat Ducato and only a couple of things with the habitation, sink tap coming loose and the power control unit fresh water alarm going off occasionally. Not bad really for a new vehicle. All the cooking items worked well and we mastered where to put the slow cooker if it was windy or looked like rain. The electric cooking pan was useful but the thermostat was not sensitive enough to be able to simmer properly and this made the paella had to cook to perfection. Similarly the Beauclair gas barbecue was very hard to get on a low level without the wind blowing the flames out so we shall have to work on that one.

We used almost all of what had been left in our 6kg gas bottle so my concerns about running out of gas was not founded and I had no need really to have taken a third bottle, primarily for the barbecue. We had cooked in the oven quite a bit and had the heating on gas as well as electric at the beginning of the holiday as it was cold overnight.

The weather had been exceptionally bad in Spain, or so the locals said, and it was not as good as we had been accustomed to when we lived there for that brief time. However on recollection I think we only had 3 days when it rained and we were on a campsite and it affected our plans. We had spoken to others in France who had had 23 days of rain out of 26! The temperatures were pretty good during the day and just about right for travelling with Smokee, our house cat.

We all thoroughly enjoyed the experience and could have stayed away longer. Living in the motorhome was easy, we are very tidy and organised which is what is needed and Smokee just loved to be sprawled out in the sun wherever it came through the windows, including the dashboard on occasions! We had set off travelling with him in his carry cage but after Dover he never travelled in it again, preferring to lie on the seat cushions and also getting on the backrest to see out of the windows. This caused some surprised looks especially on the dual carriageways when cars passed us.

Overall the sites we stayed at were excellent. Some of the French ones were a little basic and our bug bear was not enough hot water to wash the pots properly and no toilet seats. Some still had a number of those squatting toilets, when are they going to move into the 21^st century? The big bonus with the French sites though is that they do not have metered electricity so when it was colder we had no additional costs, only the often 6 or 10 amperes of electricity to juggle with. The Spanish ones were far superior and very much cleaner. We cannot really pick a favourite site out of all we stayed at as there were so many aspects of each one that we liked and you could not compare them fairly when measuring location with access to shops etc. I suppose our very first longer stay site at Los Madriles, Isla Plana, will remain in our memories for the beautiful site, heated salt water pools and gorgeous views across the bay and it being the first of for nothing else. The riverside pitch with a view of the viaduct at Millau was also wonderful.

The biggest shock was the cost of things in France when compared to Spain but after returning to the UK I am not so sure the costs are much different to home. We met a couple on holiday in Spain who were almost living in their caravan. Like us they were not yet state pensioners and had sold their house in France and decided to travel around Spain because they could no longer afford to live in France.

A disappointing aspect of the holiday was after travelling back to an area where we had lived for 16 months and come to know a lot of people, who we considered friends; we had very few visitors despite an open invitation and an apology because it was difficult for us to move to see them. The ones that did visit, and some more than once, were most welcome and we are very pleased they made the effort to do so. It was great to see our Spanish friends again and especially the children who had grown so much since the last time we had seen them. I should have realised really that most people you meet are acquaintances and not true friends, which was noticeable when we both left work to move to Spain by the lack of contact from those in the UK.

We returned home to a well-tended garden, thanks to our neighbour who kept the grass neat and tidy and collected all the beech leaves. We have now fully emptied Bessie and cleaned her inside and out before returning her to the storage facility.

Doing the ‘Post Its’ on the Caravan Club web site appealed to me and after reading some lovely stories from other members I decided to share our travels with others. It was not easy initially to get the photographs right, but I have mastered that now if I remember to change the camera setting! It takes quite some time to write them all and find internet access. Uploading them can be time consuming to say the least, especially when there are always other more enjoyable things to do and getting internet access is sometimes in the dark ages. When the stories receive no, or very little, feedback and hardly anyone ever pushes the button to say they liked your story makes you think whether all the effort is worth it.

It was good meeting up with David Klyne and his wife Margaret in Argeles sur Mer and being able to put a face to a fellow member and forum user. Wherever we went I asked all the Brits we met if they were members of the Caravan Club, and most were, but none ever used the forum or even seemed to be aware of it. Even some of the Club employees were not aware of the stories section of the forum.

Shall there be any more ‘Post It’ stories from me; well the jury is out on that one. If they receive the lack of response that the past 20+ stories have had then the answer will be a definite no. It is almost soul destroying to get no feedback and makes you think why bother and make all that effort. A counter on the web site so you could at least see if they were actually being read would go part way to providing some satisfaction, if they were being read, but I guess that would be just a pipe dream given the faults with the forum software that we already have.

So for the time being, and perhaps forever, this is the last of the Post It’s from our first holiday abroad with our new motorhome. We have really enjoyed ourselves and can’t wait to get back across there but to places we are not so familiar with next time.

Regards, Roy