It's obvious really - a motorhome is wider than a car...it's taller than a car...it needs to be driven differently than a car. And, thanks to my wonderful other half it is< driven differently. However, the one thing we seem to have struggled with in the transition from tent-camping to motorhome camping is planning the journey to our campsite with a motorhome mindset.
When we first researched which motorhome to buy we looked for a smaller motorhome; yes we wanted an overhead cab but we didn't need anything ridiculously long (under 6 metres was our aim) and nothing too wide either...we wanted to continue to explore the British Countryside in our motorhome and, tending towards more remote areas in our travels, we needed a vehicle which was going to enable to us reach the wilder locations. The Knaus Sports Traveller we eventually opted for certainly ticked these boxes...but driving home from the showroom, with me in our car following behind, I couldn't help repeating to myself, "Gosh, it is wide, isn't it. It really does fill the road." And we were travelling on B roads at the time...
Our rather significant error, to be repeated on not one, but at least 4 touring breaks before we finally learned our lesson was not making the time prior to the holiday to plan our journey. For years we had been piling luggage and our tent into the back of a car pretty much on a whim, making sure that we had some snacks on board and then setting out in the general direction of our destination, relying on a general 'crow flying' sense of where we were headed, with the SAT NAV on our phone to guide us those last few miles. Of course, it went wrong a fair few times, we took some wrong turns, but being from Devon and entirely comfortable with narrow lanes where grass grows in a fringe in the middle of the road, it was easy to sort out. In a car. Less so in a vehicle as wide as the lanes you are travelling down...
In May, a family conference and subsequent vote resulted in plans for a beach weekend on the South Hams coast – hooray! In a family of just three people the voting is swift, decisive and at times divisive. But there seemed to be no hard feelings about the prospect of a couple of nights pitched up near Bigbury and Bantham beaches on some of the more unspoilt stretches of coast in South Devon. The sea, we were reliably informed by some die-hard surfie mates of ours, would be shrugging off its winter chill and warming up nicely. So, I rooted out wetsuits (will I really squeeze into that, I wonder?) and two vintage body boards from a bygone era… it was time to initiate our small son to the joys of a South Devon beach summer! Did we think to plan our journey to the campsite? Did we look at a map and navigate a route along the more main roads so that we would spend the least possible amount of time with nettles and brambles making themselves known at the motorhome's windows and low hazel branches kissing the overhead cab? Or did we pile excitedly into the 'van and just set off in the general direction of the South Hams, mobile phone at the ready?
Roughly two miles from the campsite, we struck problems - lanes that seemed to shrink around the 'van, with looming sycamore branches trailing down from the trees above; the lane rapidly becoming a tunnel of foliage with - no, damn it - a series of sharp turns, making it difficult to turn back once we'd begun cursing the calm, insistent voice on the Nokia Drive and decided that we had definitely
gone the wrong way. Hot and sweating my husband pulled to a stop outside of a lone bungalow and I managed to squeeze over his lap and out of the driver's door, my pride folded like a cap in my hands, to knock at the door and hope for salvation...the very kindly man who lived there seemed to have seen it all before.
"Oh, you probably wished you'd stayed on the main road for a while then?" [Wry Smile.] "Well not to worry, we had a guy stuck down here yesterday with a huge caravan. Took him an hour to get round the next corner. You should be fine in that. Just keep going about a mile and you'll find the site."
A mile? Of this? Are we likely to meet anyone?"Not unless you're unlucky." [That smile again.]
You'd think we would do things differently the next outing...but the same old patterns of excitement kicked in and, sure enough, we found ourselves in deepest, darkest Exmoor, facing a stone bridge over a river that left us with little more than an inch on either side of the 'van.
GULP. The worst part of it
(apart from the calm Nokia Drive voice urging us to 'continue') was the approach to the bridge - a right angle if ever we'd seen one, with the 'van only just making it round in time to straighten up for the approach to the granite walls...
The lesson has definitely begun to sink in now, though. Prior to our next trip we will be sitting down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a
PAPER atlas...we will plan our route...we will
not reply on the phone, succumb to the velveteen tones of the Nokia Drive and we will, in doing so, hopefully arrive at the campsites we are staying on in a
slightly less rattled state.
If you'd like to share in the other Newbie Tourer errors we've made
(promise not to snigger, now, won't you?!) then check out the other blogs we've written this year:
- Inaugural Outing.
- Oops!
- What is that noise?
