We started publishing our story in the RV
magazine in September 2003 and our combined memories tell us that we
have experienced a whole lifetime of experiences in the five years
or so since Mo had the accident which cut short our lives as
Custodians of a large stately home in Cheshire and started us off in
our new lifestyle as RV full-timers. Apart from the accident
(obviously) we don’t regret a moment of our last five years as it
has bound us even closer together than we were to start with and
many people who knew us before the accident will tell you that we
were pretty close then too – so close, in fact, that when we were
Caravan Club Wardens at St Agnes Beacon in Cornwall we were known
collectively as ‘Moby Dick’ and until recently we still had letters
addressed to us as’ Moby Dick, c/o The Caravan Club Site in St
Agnes’!
Readers who have followed our story so far may
recall that as a direct result of the accident we lost our jobs as
Custodians of Arley Hall as well as the ‘tied accommodation’ that
went with the job. Our own house was built on the side of a hill
and apart from the fact that it was where Mo fell down the stairs
and broke her neck, it was also totally unsuitable for her life in
the wheelchair so we decided to buy an RV and travel off into the
wide blue yonder. We got just five miles down the road toward
Taunton when we were invited to act as Wardens of Quantock Orchard
Caravan Park, a job that we accepted as long as we only did it
during the winter months allowing us to wander off during the
summer. Mo helped to operate the telephone side of the business
from inside the RV whilst I looked after the office work and the
shop and maintained the site in good repair. It was as good a tonic
as we could have asked for, a job that both of us understood and
enjoyed, a free pitch for as long as we were working there, which in
turn saved us a few pounds in pocket money for our long summer
holidays touring. Well that’s how it was meant to be initially but
as always in our life, fate has a habit of stepping in and altering
our plans radically without so much as a ‘By your leave’. We left
Quantock Orchard Park in late April 2004 for a two month tour of
Ireland and it was during that tour that we decided to create a
photographic record of all the sites that we had visited, in order
to make it easier for us to find them again, if and when we decided
to return to them – and so was born the idea of the Big Pitch Guide.
On our way from Somerset to catch the ferry in
Wales (Pembroke) we stopped off at Dolbeare Holiday Park, near
Saltash in Cornwall, for a few days – okay - the more observant
readers amongst us will have deduced that our map-reading skills
were a little lacking in accuracy but not to worry, that is why we
have an RV, isn’t it? Suffice to say that we enjoyed our stay at
Dolbeare so much that we decided to return there for another holiday
on our return from Ireland and, in fact, we returned there several
more times that year before we had to return to Quantock Orchard to
complete our winter warden duties. It was during our last few days
in Cornwall that Mark and John, the owners of Dolbeare Park, asked
us if we would consider managing Dolbeare Park for a couple of
months this year, whilst they took an extended holiday in Spain.
This meant that we would finish working at Quantock in late May,
then spend a couple of weeks working with George and June Evans at
Brue Marina in Highbridge and then work through to the middle of
November at Dolbeare – so much for our nice easy wanderers lifestyle
cruising around the country. All the while we were writing articles
for the RV magazine and continuing to produce pages for the Big
Pitch Guide and all the while we were being pestered with requests
from readers who wanted to buy a copy of the Guide. Common sense
prevailed and we eventually decided to compile a book that we would
call ‘The Big Pitch Guide, in a fairly standard form that was easy
to read and use, that we could print at home and sell enough copies
to cover our production costs.
But something had to give way; we simply did
not have time to do everything that we wanted to or were required to
do, so we stopped writing for the magazine and every night after we
had locked the caravan site for the night, we buried our heads in
the computer in order to produce the Big Pitch Guide a whole year
earlier than we had planned. We have now reached a stage where we
have a prototype ready for printing and are currently writing to
anybody and everybody that we can think of, who might be interested
in advertising in the Guide in order to help us with the massive
production costs. Fate has once again stepped in and decreed that
if we are going to do this thing – then we have to do it properly
and our kitchen table operation has expanded into a properly formed
Company with a professionally built Internet web site,
Okay, enough of advertising the book – let’s
get on to what has happened to us since our last report in July?
Well, not a lot, actually – other than the usual mishaps that occur
to any normal Caravan Site managers. We mowed a lot of grass,
painted a lot of fences, weeded a lot of flower beds and passed the
time of day, putting the World to rights, with lots of new people;
we fell out of favour with a few and added a few to our Christmas
card list. We added to our store of unbelievable stories and
experienced a few more happenings, some of which you wouldn’t
believe and some which we wouldn’t believe - if they hadn’t happened
to us!
Most of the following stories have nothing to
do RV’ing but lots to do with life on the other side of the
reception desk in a caravan park so should you not wish to know what
a warden’s life is like, you can stop reading here and move on to
the next article.
In mid-summer a motorhome arrived on site,
accompanied by a bright yellow minibus, and booked in for a
three-week stay. After the arrivals procedure both vehicles were
sited on a pitch and that was the very last time that we saw the
three occupants (mother, father and ‘mid-twenties’ son) in
daylight. Occasionally one of them was spotted in the toilet block
emptying the cassette but never together, never to talk to and
never, ever in daylight! Several days before the end of their
allotted three weeks stay both vehicles were seen driving out of the
site at about 6.30 in the morning and never seen again – and what is
more, when I went to check their pitch I found their hook-up cable
still attached to the bollard, all their carpets hanging on the
ranch rail fence, a pair of shoes sitting tidily on the doormat and
their aquaroll sitting on the pitch with water pump hanging out of
the top. We think that something had spooked them and they had
simply jumped out of the Motorhome disconnected everything as it
stood and drove off in a cloud of dust – is that weird or not?
In January a lady phoned a caravan booking
through for a week stay in July, the start of the high season, and
paid her £20 deposit. Later on in mid June she phoned to cancel the
booking and demanded her deposit back. It was pointed out to her
that on the booking form it was quite plainly stated that the
deposit was non-refundable but she got quite upset about it and
demanded the re-imbursement again. A day or two later we got a
letter from a premier Club saying that they had had a letter from
this lady and in their opinion thought we were being a bit
high-handed and should reconsider the refunding of the deposit
otherwise they might not consider us fit to advertise in their guide
in the future. It was with amazement that we read the Club’s own
booking form that contained a clause quite clearly stating that
deposits paid to them were totally non-refundable and when we phoned
them to point out this incontrovertible fact, the phone was put down
on us and we never heard from them again. A simple case of Big
Brother telling us ‘Don’t do as I do – do as I say’. Our site
appeared in the following year’s guidebook as normal.
An email arrived at Dolbeare that stated the
following: It is with regret that I have to cancel the booking
that I made last week. This is due to the fact that the Motorhome
we were borrowing was confiscated in France because the owners *****
of a son got it impounded by the French Authorities because he was
smuggling.
It was the height of the season and we were
fully booked when a rather battered caravan appeared outside of the
office with a young-ish couple pleading for a pitch for a couple of
nights. It seems that they had covered most of Cornwall looking for
somewhere to stay and had met with the same ‘Site Full’ signs
wherever they went. We had a pitch at the front of the site which
nobody liked to use because it was too close to the office and the
road and everybody had to walk or drive past this pitch in order to
get onto the site. We offered this pitch to the couple who took it
gladly and in no time at all, they were pitched and settling down to
a sun tan and a glass of red wine. Later that evening the
fish-and-chip mobile fryer arrived and parked adjacent to the young
couple’s caravan in such a manner that the queue formed around the
road directly facing the caravan. By this time the young couple had
consumed several glasses of red wine and their thoughts had turned
to other things – if the violent rhythmic shaking of the caravan was
anything to go by! It so happens that our mobile fryer will only
cook to order - consequently each order can take up to ten minutes
to process and therefore most of the queue stood watching the young
couple’s caravan for some time before the performance ended. About
ten minutes or so later both of them emerged from the caravan
looking somewhat the worse for wear – to be met with a complimentary
round of applause from the onlookers with one wag calling out from
the back “I give it 6 out of 10!” Thank goodness the young couple
took it in good fun and laughed it off – in fact, I think they even
got a free fish supper “for the entertaining the queue above and
beyond the call of duty”.
Finally, we recently had a phone call from
Brian and Sheila Bath who stated that they had bought our first RV
‘Harvey’ and wondered whether we could get together for a reunion.
We were at Brue Marina in Highbridge that weekend and within a
couple of hours Harvey arrived complete with Brian and Sheila and a
goodly chinwag was had by all. |
