My History of Camping

We lets see I started camping in the Scouts which is a long time ago.

As I separated from my first wife I bought a tent for my boys and I to get out so we could go fishing and get away cheaply.  Then with Stephanie it came into use for the six of us to get away even further so the first picture actually shows the last outing of the big tent, a Litchfield 4 man.  

We were at Monkey Tree CP at Newquay and there was a storm in Looe, but we got the harshness of the storm and the tent leaked  so severely leaving Stephanie to declare no more camping.

We then acquired a Rambler 550 5 berth, this is where I was described as Mad  for caravanning.  What people thought was I must be mad for doing it with such a bad spinal problem as I have.

The Rambler leaked like a sieve so on the opening of a new caravan shop in Chesterfield we went to look around, Stephanie sat in a caravan and said “Fetch a salesman” the kids all pretended to faint especially as she had declared that I was not allowed to buy anything as we were skin ( a normal state then) but somehow we ended up with the Award Globestar which lasted us for a good span of time and also got us a free 2 weeks at Stowford Farm Meadows - an opening offer from the Caravan Shop.  

The Award eventually was exchanged for a brand new van - well it should have been but due to a fire at the dealers our caravan was burnt out, but we got the display model so we were better off than some people who lost everything.   We still have the Pageant and you can’t miss us on the road as the back panel is covered with stickers of where we have taken it.

Tow car wise we started with the excellent Laguna Sport 1.9dci which we changed due to a duff gearbox so we thought we would try a 4x4 but the only one we could afford was a Frontera 2.4i and we then headed off on our next trip which just happened to be Twin Lakes now this helped me learn how to drive it and work out fuel consumption. This trip meant that we started to look for a new car as soon as we got back to the UK.  We exchanged both of our cars to get a Skoda Octavia 1.9dci unfortunately not 4x4 but still an excellent car running at 60mpg when solo and with the 2 of us and a normal load on the caravan we get 37-42 mpg towing.  This means for now we have an excellent and reliable towcar

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