The weather forecast predicted driving rain and gale force winds with a possibility of snow coming down from Scotland and by 6.30 in the morning we had had them all. The rain had fallen incessantly for most of the night and the ground surrounding our pitch was absolutely soaked with puddles of half frozen water. The Quantock hills were covered with a beautiful cap of pure white snow but by this time most of the snow that had settled on the caravan park had started to thaw, adding to the already excessive surface water.
Dressed in warm winter clothes, I still shivered as Mo and I went through the routine of making Harvey, our 36ft Georgetown, ready for the road – final dump of the black tank and back-flush with fresh water, final empty of the grey tank, close down and wind in the fresh water hose, switch off the electric – unplug and wind in the hook-up cable. Of course, most of these items had been lying on the muddy grass close to the side of Harvey’s gravel pitch which required that they all had to be wiped clean and dry before storage – which in turn meant that I got my shoes, trousers and hands thoroughly wet and dirty. All the external gear cleaned and stowed, a quick climb up the rear ladder to check that all the roof gear was in its correct place and the hatch covers firmly closed then I was back inside Harvey standing on the first step inside the door - house rules state that I am not allowed to go any further into the interior until I had stripped off the dirty clothes and then washed my hands.
Mo wound in the slides and I locked them in place, we raised the jacks and completed a final check around the inside of the vehicle before I go back to the stairwell and climb back into my muddy wet clothes and shoes in order to collect the various wooden blocks and chocks from under the jacks and store them in the lower wet locker. I take one final look at the short stretch of grass that we have to drive over before we are on the tarmac road and with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I know, I just know, that I am going to have to cover that grass or we will sink in it. I spend half an hour scouring the park for some kind of trackway that will support ten tons of Motorhome in crossing a small patch of soggy wet bog – I find a few bits and pieces and, once again, get thoroughly soaked and covered in mud as I lay them in the line where I think Harvey’s rear wheels will travel. Back inside the vehicle I strip, wash my hands, dress in my good ‘driving’ clothes and shoes, climb into the drivers seat and listen to the mellifluous tones of Harvey’s 8-litre engine as it purrs into life. Release the park brake, engage DRIVE and, heart thumping with apprehension, gently roll forward toward the road checking that the rear wheels are lining up nicely with the trackway – turn the front wheels slightly to avoid a hedge and then realise that we are no longer moving – the rear wheels have missed the track and are spinning helplessly on the wet grass. Without conscientiously thinking of my actions, I engage neutral, apply the park brake, switch off the engine, open the driver’s door, and leap out to assess the situation. It was just as I was about to land in the great muddy puddle under the front wheel that I remembered that I was still dressed in my ‘Sunday best’ and Mo would kill me when I got back into the bus – it was simply not going to be one of my better days!
There is a dog-leg bend in the entrance of Quantock Orchard Caravan Park which means that we cannot drive out of the park with the car trailer attached to Harvey – at 54 ft long we are simply too long to get through the dog-leg, so we have to take Harvey out solo and then attach the trailer whilst parked on the minor road outside the park. I scraped the ice and snow off of the car windows, opened the door, and tried to start the engine, at which point I discovered that the car had a flat battery! My fault entirely – we had bought a new battery several weeks before, because the old battery simply would not hold it’s charge on a really cold night – and it was still sitting in one of Harvey’s side lockers waiting for me to find time to fit it. Giving myself a severe smacked wrist for lethargy, I grabbed an adjustable spanner and fitted the new battery in double-quick time, then hitched on the trailer and drove it outside the park where I proceeded to load the car onto the trailer and strapped it down ready for the journey to come.
Through pressure of work we had not used the trailer for a couple of months and had forgotten one of the fundamentals – we mistakenly loaded the car onto the trailer before we attached the trailer to Harvey – nothing wrong with that - except that manhandling a ton-and-a-half of twin-axle, car-loaded trailer, in a howling gale on a slush-covered road is an action not to be taken lightly. I climbed back into Harvey, went through the clean clothes routine, got the expected ear-bashing from Mo about ruining my best shoes and proceeded, just for once in my life, to reverse Harvey’s towing-hook to an almost perfect docking position beside the trailer hitch. Back into my dirty clothes, I very cockily swaggered back to hitch on the trailer – at which point the jockey wheel on the trailer collapsed, leaving the trailer tow hitch about nine inches too low to attach to Harvey. Readers who have followed the story of our Irish tour in Harvey may remember that we thumped the jockey wheel on the loading ramp as we drove onto the ferry at Pembroke Dock and although we had no further problem with the trailer we knew that one day the jockey wheel would have to be replaced – I just wish that we had done it before today! I thought that I might be able to manually lift the trailer hitch onto Harvey’s hook but whether it was the cold, or I was wearing the wrong shoes, I simply couldn’t lift the 75Kg nose weight just those few measly inches – so I had to go back to basic engineering and jack and pack the trailer hitch until it was at just the right height. Luckily the jack was easily available and the chocks were in the lower locker where I had only just stowed them so getting the trailer hitch high enough off of the ground to connect it onto Harvey was a piece of cake - were it not for the constant stream of morning dog-walkers from the site who wanted to know what I was doing, or even worse, telling me exactly how they would do it because, of course, I was doing it all wrong, blah, blah, blah. Bearing in mind that I am the warden of a privately owned site and depend upon these people for my future income, I have to grin, grit my teeth and agree with every word they say, whilst at the same time I blow them to smithereens with my imaginary sub-machine gun!
At last, all is in order and fully road checked, I am back on board Harvey dressed in my final set of clean clothes, the engine is ticking over on LPG, the Tom-Tom sat-nav is set and we are off on our way to the motorway. After a couple of hours steady driving we had covered about 100 miles when the red light showed up on the LPG monitor to indicate that we had run out of ‘road’ gas – a flip of the switch and in the blink of an eyelid we are driving on petrol – except that the gauge is showing the petrol tank more than three-quarters empty and we still have at least fifty miles to go. There is no problem with refuelling as we know that Strensham Service station is not too far up the road and before long we are pulling onto the slip road for fuel. We haven’t been into Strensham before with Harvey so we are not too sure of where to go, except that it will be either the coach lane or the HGV lane. The turn into the coach lane appeared a bit too quickly for comfort and we thought it a bit tight for Harvey towing the trailer so we carried on in the HGV lane where, after queuing for a few minutes, we found to our dismay that only diesel was on offer and what is worse - there is no way back into the service station from the HGV lane. Not to worry, the needle is still only just under the quarter-full mark so we should be able to make it to the next service station that is shown as approximately twenty miles or so up the road.
A little apprehension is creeping into my thoughts at this time – in my imagination, we are stranded on the hard shoulder of the motorway with a police car sitting behind us, blue lights flashing, while the very stern-faced motorway cop is giving me a dressing down for being stupid enough to venture out onto the road knowing full well that I had not enough petrol to complete my journey then, out of the blue, a breakdown truck appears with ten gallons of petrol, except this petrol costs at least £100 per gallon and I don’t have any cash on me……..the mind boggles!
A sign appears which shows that the next service station is only 2 miles further on, a quick glance at the fuel gauge shows that we are now just into the red and my heart starts to beat a little faster but I am pretty sure that we will make it safely – at which point Tom-Tom, the sat-nav, tells me that I have to turn left in one mile’s distance. We can’t stop to check the map because we have left it at home so we have to make an instant decision – go straight on to get some petrol and then come back on ourselves is the safe option but we are running out of time, as our destination shuts at 5pm and it is now 4.15 - or hope that the gauge is under reading and Harvey will run for several miles on an empty tank. On the basis that ‘a watched kettle never boils’ therefore ‘a watched petrol tank never runs dry’ we throw caution to the wind and turn left - albeit with our pulse rate matching that of a jumbo-jet pilot landing at Heathrow.
Our concerns gradually disappear as within just a few miles we are off of the motorway and driving along a dual carriageway in the full knowledge that we are only a mile or so from our destination and thankfully at 4.35pm we turn into the side road at the end of our journey. A few minutes later, we had unloaded the car, unhitched the trailer, turned it around, and hitched it onto the car - another few minutes, a cup of coffee, a comfort break and we had completed the legalities. Now came the bit that we really were not looking forward to - it was time to say our final farewell to Harvey.
Mo and I had thought long and hard over the last six months or so about our life as full-timers and whether it was turning out as we expected – the result of which we both agreed was that almost everything was as good, if not better, than we had imagined and we should have tried it many years ago. That is not to say that we haven’t been through bad patches and that we couldn’t find areas that we felt we could improve in some way or another. Harvey was our first RV and, in almost every aspect, suited us down to the ground; however, one minor irritation that had become a bit of a nuisance was the difficulty Mo was having in climbing around the engine casing in order to get into her passenger seat – a situation which could only be remedied by a vehicle such as a ‘pusher’. Another long-term consideration was the internal space required by the wheelchair – Harvey was equipped with a double slide-out but even so space in the bedroom was quite limited when using the ‘chair’. Finally, of course, if we were to consider part-exchanging Harvey for a bigger RV then we had to do it sooner rather than later in order to limit wear, tear and mileage in order to maintain his resale value – either we did it now or we held onto him forever. As full-timers we spend quite a lot of time at our two semi-permanent addresses, Quantock Orchard in Somerset and Dolbeare in Cornwall, which for various reasons meant that we should stay with an RV of about 36ft in length and look to expand the vehicle by increasing the number of slide-outs.
After several months of searching we had short-listed three vehicles we thought to be suitable and within our budget, a superb 3 year old Monaco Diplomat (triple-slide) from ‘Itchy Feet’ in Cornwall, a brand-new 38ft Georgetown (triple-slide) from Freedom Motorhomes in Tewkesbury and, finally, a new and unregistered 2004 Monaco Cayman (quad-slide) from Travelworld in Wolverhampton.
Having to make the final decision was going to mean upsetting at least two of the dealers, each of whom we had plagued the life out of, each of whom had helped us immensely in our search, but the vehicle we eventually would choose had to be the one that suited our requirements the most. It is true that we agonised over the decision for a couple of weeks but eventually a much-scrutinised list of pros and cons led us to select the Monaco Cayman from Travelworld. Our reasons are too many and diverse to discuss in this forum and only time will tell whether we have made the right decision but the choice, once made, felt totally right to us – and at the end of the day, that’s what really matters.
Sad though we were to part with Harvey, our first RV, we know from our experiences with him that he is a survivor and that he will go on to provide excellent fun and service to his new owners. For our part, we are on tenterhooks awaiting a phone call from Travelworld to say that our new vehicle, together with a whole range of new experiences, is ready for collection.
Yes, Tuesday 18th January 2005 truly turned out to be a bittersweet day, bitter in saying goodbye to Harvey but sweet in saying hello to BU54MPY, soon to be known simply as ‘Bumpy’. Roll on! |
