Much diesel has passed through the tank of ‘Bumpy’, our Monaco Cayman 36PDQ, since the last time we decided to put pen to paper and update our story – a sign of our increasing age maybe but time seems to be passing quicker than ever and our planned leisure periods, where we can just sit down and chill out, are getting fewer and shorter. Perhaps this feeling started back in February when Mo lost her Mother to old age which just served to reinforce the view that time waits for no-one – or maybe the scent of the ‘Tiddy Oggie’ (the Cornish Pasty – to the uninitiated) that has been gently wafting in the background ever since we left Cornwall was beginning to overtake the pleasure of the ‘Lardy Cake.’ Whatever it was, we decided in March, to take a short break at Summercourt in order to attend the Itchyfeet Open Weekend, with the intention of selling a few more copies of the Big Pitch Guide and to re-stock the freezer with plenty of ‘proper’ pasties.
Now the last time we decided to take a short break in Cornwall was back in 1990 – we had both tired of our military life in Berkshire and had made the decision to pack up the caravan and disappear into the wild blue yonder, going wherever the fancy took us. We got as far as Cornwall where we ended up managing the St Agnes Beacon Caravan Club Site for six years during which time we bought a second house and merged with the local community to forge many deep friendships and a lasting love of the rough and tumble coastline.
This time, of course, it was going to be different – we were definitely only going down there for a long weekend and then we were going to tour Wales, Scotland and England - all the while updating the Big Pitch Guide - before eventually disappearing off to Germany to visit the fabulous Christmas markets and to retrace our footsteps through Berlin, which we had visited in 1980 but would dearly like to see once again, now that it has merged back into a single city.
The best laid plans of mice and men! So many events have conspired to change our plans that it is almost impossible to remember them all or even in which order they occurred – one of the first though, was the pitch we were allocated on arrival at Itchyfeet – scenic, all-facility, all-weather – adjectives just simply do not do justice to the place and we have returned to that same pitch every time on return from our sporadic forays into the outside world.
Demand for the Big Pitch Guide has continued to grow to the extent that it now requires almost continuous attention in answering the post, the emails and the telephone, which, coupled with constant requests for the Continental Edition has meant that we are glued to the computer far more than we would wish.
The first item of real change to our current circumstances occurred on the 15th April when we spotted an advert in the local newspaper from a lady who was desperate to re-home her cat. Mo and I have been the proud owners of various cats, mostly Siamese, over the years and had been actively considering adopting a new one just as soon as we could find one. Unfortunately for us, most re-homing societies did not consider that full-timing in an RV constituted a settled lifestyle and therefore simply refused to let us adopt a rescue cat of any sort. We, on the other hand, felt that it would not be right for us to pay huge sums of money to buy a pair of kittens when there were so many lovely cats out there looking for a loving home so to cut short a long story, we visited the lady, fell in love with the cat and brought her home without further ado – or so we thought!
She is a Burman, who, at that time was about 14 months old and she has a pedigree and name as long as your arm and almost impossible to pronounce so she was immediately re-named ‘Misty.’ Although she had not at that time been neutered she was actually registered as ‘not fit’ for breeding which being as we only wanted a lap-cat pet did not bother us in the least. However, the minute we got her home she started calling – and calling – and calling, and for those people familiar with Oriental cats, you will know the volume of noise an Oriental can raise when they have a mind too. She was on heat and she was going to let everyone know about it – she had an itch that needed to be scratched and she didn’t care too much about who did the scratching – the painted hussy! We didn’t dare let her venture outside the RV in case she annoyed the neighbours with her yelling - but what we didn’t realise until much later was that her calling could be heard inside a brick-built house on the other side of the road to us, let alone the people parked right alongside of us. We thought she might calm down a bit if we took her for a walk, so we fitted her with a small dog’s harness, attached her to a lightweight retractable lead and set off around the golf course in order to tire her out so that we could at least get some semblance of a night’s sleep. Can you picture the scene, a six foot square retired army officer strutting his stuff around a crowded private golf course - trailing a long piece of string attached to which was a little fluffy pussy cat, screaming it’s head off – oh, the shame of it.
We had to put up with that behaviour for three weeks before the local Vet considered her ready to neuter, chip, inoculate and test for her passport but the difference in her behaviour after the operation was quite phenomenal. She still wanted to spend every spare minute of her time outside of the RV but at least she did it quietly and we felt that the possibility of being asked to leave the site (as the campers from hell) was growing less by the day. We sought advice from all and sundry as to how we could encourage her to stay at home with us and gradually her previous history began to emerge – it seems everybody in the district had heard about her, except us, of course. Apparently she had been kept in a garden shed by her previous owner because her husband did not like cats – she had been given to several other people in the two months before we met her and had been rejected by all of them due to her insular behaviour – it was no wonder she was a mixed-up moggie. Mo and I are both fairly strong-minded characters, and we determined that we were going to straighten out this pussycat come hell or high water – I assure you, dear reader, strong character or not, she came close to beating us. No matter how much love and attention we showered upon her, she would fight to get out of the RV at any time day or night – no matter what food we offered her, she would still hunt 24 hours a day but gradually she started to realise that she could come or go as she pleased and we would be waiting for her.
Our leisurely lifestyle, of necessity, has been turned upside down – no longer can we go shopping at whatever time we decide, we have to pick a time when the sun won’t roast her, or us, inside the car because, of course, we can’t open the windows or the sunroof due to her escapology traits. We couldn’t leave her in the RV by herself, as she would probably eat her way out through either the windows or the walls before we got home. She is the only cat we have ever had that really loves being out driving with us in the car – she sits on the parcel shelf and gives me stick if I allow anything to overtake us, and then puts on her ‘really hard done by’ look when we park in Truro in the hope that a passer-by will knock on the door and allow her the slightest possible chance to escape if we dare to open it in answer. She also has the quaint custom of using her ‘dirt’ box for a ‘proper job’ whenever we are out in the car but she has acquired the skill of using it in the most impossible situation as far as the driver is concerned, for example, just as we enter a five-mile long clearway we will hear the shuffle of sand in her litter tray followed in short order by the ‘aroma’, or when we are stuck at the traffic lights and we simply can’t get to the box to clean it out. Boy, has she perfected that one - but more of that later.
Most of our work on the Continental Guide has been done on our desktop computer where we connect to the Internet via a vodaphone 3G/GPRS datacard just as one would with a laptop. The problem being that we are a long way away from the 3G mast so are limited to normal GPRS reception and for those of you who can remember the days before ‘broadband’ you will appreciate that our connection is very slow – to the extent that we have reverted to our original procedure – ‘press a key, go for a coffee, press another key, have another coffee’ – the net result of which is that my waistline has now exceeded my trouser waist and Mo has confiscated my car! I keep trying to explain to her that if people were meant to walk long distances then nobody would have invented the wheel – all to no avail I’m afraid – she insists that I walk a couple of miles every day to the paper shop and back – but what she hasn’t cottoned on to yet, is that if I walk a bit quick on the way there, I can dawdle on the way back whilst chewing my way through a steak pasty. ‘Proper job’, as they say hereabouts!
One of the good things about being on the Internet is that I can switch on to the ‘ABP Leisure’ web site and take part in the very lively discussions that take place therein. I quite like helping others with their problems, in the same way that I appreciate it when others put themselves out to help me – sometimes I get myself into trouble for my forthright views on certain subjects and get my ears soundly boxed by others on the site and sometimes I get thanked for the help that I may have supplied.
One of the side effects is that Mo and I get quite a lot of phone calls direct from people who want to discuss, in private, various things to do with RV’s and full-timing. It was as a direct result of one of those phone calls that we found that our RV is actually oversize and to all intents and purposes should not be on the road! We could never understand why we could drive in and out of our first home base in Taunton, in our 36ft Georgetown, without fear of scraping the sidewalls in the entrance ‘dogleg’ and yet the first time we tried to enter with the Cayman 36 it was a struggle that resulted in us actually grazing a two inch bruise on the way out.
With all the discussions on the ABP website about oversize vehicles, we finally took a tape measure to ours and to our horror (and delight) we found our 36ft RV was actually 37ft 6 inches long. I say to our horror, for the simple fact that we had stressed very strongly in the Big Pitch Guide that nobody with an RV that was 1 inch over 36 ft long should ever attempt to enter Quantock Orchard Caravan Park and yet, there was us trying it in a 37footer! I say ‘to my delight’ because up until then Mo had always blamed the bruise on my bad driving - so I was vindicated to a certain extent, not that it made one iota of difference because I now get blamed for not checking the length beforehand. The DVLA has now stated that my Cayman is illegal because it is too wide – the maximum legal width of the vehicle should be no more than 2·55 metres and apparently some boffin has measured ours at 2·553 metres – I ask you 3 millimetres too wide - that is just about the collective thickness of the decorative murals stuck on the side of the RV. Compare that to the rear-view mirrors that stick out 9 inches both sides and I don’t think I will lose too much sleep over being too wide!
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