A short month but a very busy month with a sad ending for us – Audrey (Mother-in-Law) passed away on 22nd February and preparations are now in hand for the funeral on the 2nd March. Ever since she was a baby, Mo has refused to eat potatoes or drink milk - I, on the other hand, regularly drink several pints of milk per day and love potatoes in any shape or form but being the gentleman that (I hope) I am, I settled for a life of ‘pasta’ in place of potatoes and lemon tea in place of a proper ‘cuppa’. That is until the day we were invited to dinner with the In-Laws and Audrey served me a generous portion of both roast and boiled potatoes with my meal followed by a mouth-watering sweet – rice pudding with a skin on it! Not only that, Audrey then quietly but firmly advised her daughter to follow her example and cosset me with a carpet of potatoes on which to base every future ‘main course’ followed by any milk product sweet - as long as it had a skin on. I knew from that day on that this was a family that I could live with! Audrey and Harry had been married for well over 60 years with a love so strong that it even astounded the Hospital doctors – she had been admitted to Torbay Hospital after a very severe stroke from which she was not expected to recover and with almost no vital signs responding to the doctors in the Intensive Care Unit, to all intents and purposes it was only the machinery keeping her alive. Absolutely nothing changed for several days and we were advised to make plans for the ‘final’ family get-together – but that weekend, after Audrey had been moved out of the ICU into a quieter side ward, we wheeled Harry in to see her whereupon, to everybody’s astonishment, she suddenly opened her eyes and said ‘Hello, Harry.’ It has to be said that Audrey immediately fell back into her previous totally unresponsive state but contact had been made – Harry was obviously overwhelmed and Mo and I tactfully withdrew to let them be together for, perhaps, the final time. We returned some time later to find both of them absolutely fast asleep with their hands firmly entwined together, Harry in his wheelchair and Audrey in her hospital ‘cot’ and after a very one-sided conversation with ‘Mum’ we took ‘Dad’ home knowing in our hearts that this would probably be the end. Both Mo and I will treasure that one moment in Hospital, when Audrey recognised Harry and proved beyond all doubt that true love can sometimes shine through even the most traumatic experience.
I wonder how many RV’ers really know just how much electric they use in the normal day-to-day occupation of their RV. Mo and I were lucky enough to be connected to an individually ‘metered’ 16amp hook-up during our six-month tenure at Dolbeare Park in Cornwall – I say lucky enough because we were using Bumpy, our 36ft quad-slide Monaco Cayman, in a totally electric mode - heating, cooking, lighting, battery-charging, computer, TV, absolutely everything on board was based on using electric and whilst we were employed at Dolbeare we didn’t have to pay for it and, to be truthful, we didn’t even give it a thought. During the summer months with no heating required we used, on average, £11 of electric per week but as soon as we switched on one or other of the roof-mounted air conditioners that average weekly bill went up to over £18. During the winter we use a 1½Kw oil-filled radiator to heat the lounge, a ½Kw oil-filled radiator to heat the bedroom, we have a small de-humidifier working 24/7 in the driver’s foot well, we do enjoy a roast dinner cooked in our electric oven and use the electric immersion heater in preference to the gas boiler to keep the hot water tanked up for frequent showers, clothes and dish washing. I have to be honest and say that the first time we read the meter after switching on the radiators it made my eyes pop open to see an average weekly bill in the region of £35 but because it was free it still really did not strike us as expensive. And then we moved to Brue Yachts where we are restricted to a 10amp supply that required an immediate and drastic recalculation of our electric usage. The radiators had to be replaced with the ordinary LPG furnace heating, the domestic kettle had to be replaced by the 600watt caravan kettle, absolutely everything on board has to be switched off if we want to use the electric oven but the biggest eye-opener of all was the immersion heater where we discovered that the actual element requires a 12amp supply – 2amps more than we had to start with! A month or so later and we now have plenty of experience of living almost entirely on LPG – the radiators are consigned to storage, the electric immersion switch has a cobweb hanging off of it (or it did have until I spotted it) and we are well trained in the routine of preparing to use the microwave or the oven - and the net outcome – a bill of approximately £13 per week for LPG; we drive up to our local BP garage and tank up the LPG every three weeks at a cost of around £40; and I don’t have to repeatedly walk out into the cold wet winter’s night to reset the hook-up.
My DIY skills, such as they are, have been taking a real bashing this last week; we had driven up to the Service station to fill up with LPG and on our return to Highbridge, I switched on the gas tank as normal but noticed the little red tell-tale light didn’t come on - followed fairly quickly by a call from Mo that the gas hob wouldn’t light and that she couldn’t get the LPG water heater to catch. We still had not connected to the electric hook-up so I started the LPG generator and was initially rewarded with it’s lovely quiet purr as it powered up the system – then it died a death and refused to start again. I looked around for any obvious cause, I couldn’t smell any gas leaks anywhere, the tank sounded as if it was switching on and off properly and I couldn’t see any in-line fuses anywhere in the vicinity of the gas tank. I read through the American Handbook to no avail other than to realise that the Americans speak an entirely different brand of language to us and that their handbooks are designed only to tell us of a million and one things that will harm us if we are stupid enough to try to do them. In desperation I phoned the workshops at Travelworld to ask if any of their engineers knew of an instant fix and they really did their best to try to fix the problem over the phone, even to the extent of stripping the fuse box in their own Cayman whilst trying to identify a possible electric fault. George from Brue Yachts came over and together we slowly but surely eliminated all of the possible causes until eventually we came to the final 12-volt vehicle fuse box. We read through the list of fuses to see if there was a fuse that could in any way identify with the LPG system – there was nothing obvious but one 7·5amp fuse that did catch my eye read “LPSol” and seeing as nothing else even resembled the word ‘LPG’ I changed it for another 7·5amp fuse and ‘bingo’ everything worked as normal once again. The more enlightened amongst you will by now be screaming at me for not interpreting “LPSol” as ‘LPG Solenoid’ – a device which apparently switches on and off the gas supply from the main gas tank to the individual gas apparatus – well I’m sorry but I couldn’t tell you the difference between a solenoid and a salt-cellar, I’m not proud of it but that’s the way it is, so there!
None of which matters one little jot anyway because after having satisfactorily started everything I then settled down for a well-earned cup of tea when I was disturbed by a knock on the door from our neighbours, Peter and Hilary Reynolds who told us that they had spotted water pouring from the LPG water heater vent at the back end of Bumpy. Wearily I dragged on my winter clothes and went to investigate – have you ever noticed that when you are about to investigate a fault outside the vehicle, the wind begins to blow at gale force, the rain comes down in freezing cold bucketfuls and day turns into pitch-black night at a ridiculously early hour in the afternoon – this day was no different. The water pouring out from the heater vent was soon traced to a small split in the plastic looking ‘bung’ at the bottom of what was obviously the pressurised hot water tank; this stream of water was being directed, at high pressure, straight onto the main LPG gas jet which, being totally soaked, was refusing point blank to fire up and produce the necessary power to heat the water. No problem, I thought, just apply a little elbow power to a spanner on the bung and all will be solved – hah, if only things were so easy we wouldn’t need repairmen, would we? I very gently fitted my adjustable spanner to the bung and even more gently turned it a little to tighten it up and stop the leak – at which point the outer end of the bung very gently separated from the inner end and fell onto the floor - and the small split in the bung became a large split and I got soaked in a steady stream of luke-warm water. Like the little boy in Holland who stuck his finger in the hole in the dyke to save his Nation from flooding, I stuck my thumb into the vicinity of the hole in order to staunch the flow of hot water from the tank but unlike the little boy from Holland, I missed the hole and caught an electrical connection which immediately came away in my hand leaving me with that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, rain water pouring down the back of my neck, a gale of wind attempting to freeze me to the bone, a broken electric lead hanging loose from my fingers and the feeling that once again I would be in Mo’s bad books. C’est la vie!
The nearest RV dealer to our base at Highbridge is Freedom Motorhomes at Tewkesbury so without more ado I got on the phone to them, explained the problem to their workshops and they very promptly identified the broken wire as being the very easy to replace ‘universal’ LPG thermostat which they had in stock and would I like them to mail it to me or would I like to collect it in person. Being full-timers, hot water is not a luxury to Mo and I, it is an absolute necessity - and the prospect of brewing numerous kettles of water for a shower, using a 600 watts kettle, is not exactly an exciting prospect so within the hour I was on the Motorway heading for Tewkesbury where the relevant parts, together with fitting instructions, had been placed at the front desk to await our arrival – such is the excellent service we have come to expect from Freedom Motorhomes. Five hours later, with the rain still pouring down my neck, the bung had been replaced, the thermostat had been replaced and tested, the water system refilled and tested, the gas had been fired up and I sat down to that long awaited cup of tea.
The Friends of the Big Pitch Guide Society continues to grow daily and just as we had hoped, so does the interaction between friends with questions to ask and answer. Last month we asked for anybody with practical knowledge of ‘disabled’ RV’ing to contact us in order to help a prospective RV’er – I am more than pleased to report that a family did contact us with all the help we needed and the offer of direct face-to-face contact was also freely offered – our thanks to Alan and Irene – the immediate problem has been sorted but we will keep your offer on file, if you don’t mind.
A point was raised about the decimal version of Latitude and Longitude that we use on the sites in the Big Pitch Guide, a point which I have also seen raised in Paul Rees’ website www.abpleisure.co.uk. It concerns the conversion of decimal Lat and Long to Degrees/minutes/seconds Lat and Long. For anybody reasonably conversant with using the Internet - sign on to www.fcc.gov/mb/audio - then look on the left-hand side of the screen at the yellow column where you should see an MB shortcuts box. In the box - scroll down to ‘Lat/Long decimal-degrees’ and click on ‘start short cut.’ Easy when you know how, isn’t it?
On the subject of the Internet could “Friends” please make a change to the Brue Yachts Site page, (Site number 60) where George has changed his email address to georgeevans421@btinternet.com and then erase Brue Yachts web site at www.george@evans4333.freeserve.co.uk as it no longer exists.
Keep an eye on the www.the-big-pitch-guide.com web site in the next couple of weeks – with experience we are now adapting it to enable Friends to sign in and extract new sites and updated sites at their own convenience. It will take us a day or three but it will enhance the site considerably.
One major breakthrough for the Friends came about early in February 2006. Ann K phoned us to say that on the advice of the Big Pitch Guide she and her husband had visited several sites with a view to booking an RV tour and had been happily accepted at each of the sites they had contacted. A couple of days later they had telephoned one of the sites, The Losehill Caravan Club Site, to confirm the booking but were dismayed to be told that Losehill could only take RV’s up to 30ft in length, whereas the Big Pitch Guide had been quoted 38ft maximum and Ann, only two days previously, had been told 36ft maximum. I telephoned the Wardens at Losehill who told me they were quite happy to accept vehicles larger than 30ft but their ‘screen’ had told them the maximum size they could accept was no more than 30ft – and they had to abide by the ‘Rules and Regulations’. I telephoned the Caravan Club Area Manager, Steven Rowcroft, to see if the size change was to be a permanent ruling or just a short-term situation and explained how we had been assured of the pitch size before the publication of the Big Pitch Guide etc., etc., etc., and he assured us that he would investigate the problem and phone us back. True to his word, within the hour, he called us back to say that the ‘screen’ was indeed wrong, that ‘only’ last winter the Caravan Club had built 3 purpose designed RV pitches and that he was mighty pleased that we had pointed out the error as he would have to justify the expenditure on the new pitches if it was found that no-one was going to use them. Full marks to Steven Rowcroft of the Caravan Club for moving so quickly to correct an error, to Ann and her family for raising the point and to the combined ‘power’ of the Friends Society who now can provide enough ‘consumer’ power to ask people to sort out a situation rather than just ignoring it in the hope that it will go away. More Friends – more power to our elbow!
My secret lardy cake bakery has been discovered and it’s identity published on the ‘net – so much so that the lardies are now even harder to come by, shame to say – but never no mind, June at Brue Yachts has put me on to a Fish and Chip shop that serves the best fish in the South West so I have changed my ways.
Oh well, back to producing more copies of the Big Pitch Guide – we are at the Freedom Motorhomes Open Weekend in early March followed soon after by the Itchyfeet Open Weekend followed fairly soon after by the Malvern Show – maybe, just maybe we will then manage to take a day off – I don’t think!
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