Time marches on’, it is said: having decided to become ‘full-timers’ we had sold our house and possessions, passed the HGV driving test and finally collected the new Georgetown 346 from Freedom Motorhomes. The drive back to Taunton was the very first time we had ever driven an RV and the learning curve for both Mo and myself was just about vertical but as always, it was an experience that gets better with the telling and if nothing else re-affirmed just how dangerous ‘white-van man’ is on the narrow roads of Somerset. We arrived safely back at Quantock Orchard Caravan Park, pitched and settled down to learn how to live in and, if necessary, to adapt the RV to suit Mo’s wheelchair needs before we set off on our travels. Over the next couple of months several minor teething problems showed up, some accorded to the RV and some to our style of living but nothing too serious and all resolved without difficulty – except the inevitable problem of excess weight - and that one we are still working on. I keep telling Mo that she has to cut down on her clothes and she keeps telling me that she will - when I cut down on my computer equipment and toolbox contents – typical woman, she just doesn’t appreciate how important that old thingummy in the toolbox is, even if I haven’t used it in living memory – I just know that it will come in handy one day!
We had been invited to a wedding in Ireland in June and initial enquiries showed that the ferry fare was likely to be £450: neither Mo or I had ever been to Southern Ireland so we decided spend a couple of months over there on an extended holiday tour. We asked for advice from several caravanning friends and relatives that had been to Ireland in the last few years and in general received a positive response, except that most of them expressed reservations about the size of our rig in relation to the Irish roads, but more of that later. We decided on the Pembroke to Rosslare ferry and attempted to book a return trip through Irish Ferries, leaving on the 1st May and returning on the 30th Jun 2004. I say ‘attempted to book’ because there was a small problem of trying to convince the booking clerk at Irish Ferries that we were passenger class rather than freight class: the clerk was convinced that because of our size and the fact that we were towing a trailer meant that we must be classed as freight – however when I contacted the freight office, they said most emphatically that we were passenger class and not freight! A couple of phone calls later and we were in the very capable hands of a Mr Steve Jenkins from the Freight Office at Irish Ferries – I have no idea what he did or said, at Irish Ferries Pembroke, but just a couple of days later we got our passenger class tickets through the post with an apology for any inconvenience caused and an instruction to phone him personally if we had any further problems (there were none) – well done, Steve – we shall come back to Irish Ferries again, one day.
At the end of March 2004 we had been living in Harvey for five months and had identified several things that could be done to make life easier for ourselves, like fitting extra hooks on the bedroom door and extra shelves in ‘wasted space’ at the back of the kitchen sink, etc., etc., etc. To be honest, until now we had been treating Harvey as an expensive toy which we might one day hand back and it was only now we had started the modifications that it really sank in - this was our home and it was only right that we should adapt it, within reason, to suit ourselves. We moved to Dolbeare Park near Saltash in Cornwall, took some time for sightseeing, for completing the modifications and for planning our route around Ireland. The wedding was to take place on the 20th June in Kingscourt, Co. Cavan so, as we were due to arrive on the 1st of May, we decided to travel around Ireland in a clockwise direction starting from Rosslare, arriving at Kingscourt just in time for the wedding and then a final few days on the East coast before we were back in Rosslare in time for the return ferry.
We pored over every site directory we could find, to extract a list of sites that we considered would suit our needs and then spent time on the Internet checking our list for those sites with pitches big enough to take us. This was a handy check but proved to be totally unnecessary as we later found that most Irish sites have either already catered for the ‘bigger’ caravan or had no idea what to expect from a vehicle of our size but were perfectly willing to adapt something to suit our every need. We eventually whittled our list down to ten possible sites and telephoned them to book our tentative dates but were astonished to find that they did not want us to make formal bookings – just to call them a couple of days in advance to warn them we were on our way! With hindsight, this worked out to be a more practical approach to working our way around the island as it meant that we could lengthen or shorten our stay at each site to suit our circumstances. Our final itinerary lined up as a one-night stay at Freshwater East Caravan Club site in Pembroke on the eve of the ferry crossing to Rosslare followed by a one-night stay in Newtown Cove Park at Tramore in Ireland – from there it was planned to spend up to a couple of weeks each at Blarney, Killarney, Limerick, Knock, Sligo, Donegal and Dublin rounded off by a night down at Rosslare prior to our return ferry crossing. Well that was the plan anyway!
Due to our work commitments we had only driven Harvey a couple of hundred miles over the previous four months and therefore never had occasion to refill the ‘road’ or ‘house’ LPG tanks. We were originally shown how to do it by the staff at Freedom but they had sent us off with brim-full tanks so our first gas-refuelling trip to the local service station was undertaken with just a little trepidation and, of course, that was where our plan first went wrong. We had two LPG nozzle adaptors but were not really sure which was for what – if you see what I mean – and ‘Murphy’s Law’ dictated that we had an English-to-American nozzle plus an English-to-Continental nozzle when what we actually needed was an American-to-English nozzle – and it appeared that nobody in Cornwall knew what we were talking about - let alone supply us with one. A quick phone call to Freedom proved that they had several in stock and, with only a minor detour on our way from Cornwall to Pembroke, we could call in to pick one up. We set off immediately, calling into Quantock Orchard on the way to collect our mail from the previous month and eventually arrived in Tewkesbury later on in a very wet and windy evening. As we neared Tewkesbury ‘Harvey’ seemed to be buffeted by the wind a bit more than we expected but was still perfectly manageable so we continued that last mile to Freedom with a bit of extra caution. That was when our plan went wrong for the second time! In order to easier facilitate checking the tyre pressures on Harvey, we had added a set of tyre valve extenders and, somehow or other, one of them had managed to unscrew itself from one of the rear wheels. In doing so, it had managed to deflate the wheel to less than half pressure – hence the exaggerated ‘wandering’ on the last mile of our journey – and led us to thanking our lucky stars that we had caught it before any damage had been done. The following morning the staff at Freedom sorted it all out with very little fuss and with full tanks and plenty of time to spare, sent us on our way to the Caravan Club site at Pembroke.
In our previous careers, both Mo and I were involved in making maps for the Army and we are both proficient map-readers, however, Mo’s accident and consequent injuries have made handling the navigation much more difficult for her. To that end we decided to invest in a Satellite Navigation system that we could run utilising our laptop computer – we had seen just the thing advertised in the RV magazine so with no more ado, we sent off for it, set it up and tried it out. Our trials, when using the car, left something to be desired, because no matter what we did to the computer operating system, the program software or anything else, the laptop insisted on switching itself off every 20 minutes, whereas when we tried the same system in Harvey, it worked perfectly well for hours at a time! Eventually my brother-in-law solved the problem when he heard that I had plugged the computer into the car cigar-lighter – apparently the cigar-lighter is programmed to switch itself off every 20 minutes to prevent overheating and excessive car battery drainage – whereas in the Motorhome we had plugged the laptop into a custom 12 volt socket and therefore the supply was unadulterated. Easy, when you know how, isn’t it? I digressed from the main text to mention this satnav story, because that is how we navigated ourselves without any problem, straight to the Pembroke Club site, even though we had never been to within 50 miles of the site previously.
When fully rigged with the car trailer, Harvey measures 54 feet long which means that I cannot turn around on a sixpence - ‘whatever that may be’ - nor can I reverse quickly without sufficient space to manoeuvre a 36 ft ‘tractor’. Consequently we try not to drive Harvey to any destination that we have not checked out with the car beforehand, looking for the obvious problems - acute corners, overhanging tree branches and low bridges – as well as to familiarize ourselves with the prospective route. We asked the Club site Wardens for advice on the route to Pembroke Docks and received a warning that the most direct route through the village could cause problems due to some acute bends in the one-way system, so we popped the car off the trailer and set out to ‘recce’ the most suitable route. The Wardens advice proved to be accurate in that the direct route from the site to the port was a bit tight in places and a much easier route was found when we retraced our original route back onto the main road – in fact, that is also when we found out we could have stayed overnight on the HGV car park at the port and not only saved ourselves the trouble of the diversion to the Club site but also a small fortune in Club site fees! It is so easy with hindsight, isn’t it?
Early next morning we had emptied or filled all the relevant tanks, re-loaded the car and set ourselves up for the ferry crossing which we were still a little wary of due to the previously described ‘passenger/freight’ conflict. We were also a little apprehensive about the ramp onto the ferry due to the very low-slung LPG tanks mounted behind the petrol tank at the rear of Harvey and the possibility of scraping the tanks on the ramp as we boarded. Our fears about the passenger/freight conflict were soon happily resolved as, on arrival, we were directed to line up with the passenger cars - but that only served to increase my fears that the ferry staff were then going to expect me to successfully manoeuvre Harvey in the same space allocated to the average family car! Once again my fears proved groundless because as soon as we started to move through the loading lanes we found plenty of ‘cornering’ room available – but then we came to the end of the ramp and saw a very steep ‘step-down’ onto the deck. I mentioned my fears of scraping the back of the Motorhome to one of the staff and was reassured when told by him “all the coach-drivers say the same thing but none of them have touched so far, so why should you be any different – just take it easy and I will keep an eye on you” so I drove forward very slowly until I felt the rear axle going down steep slope, accompanied almost immediately by the screech of metal-on-metal. I stopped instantly and climbed out to inspect the damage, accompanied by the now, very red-faced, member of staff who was repeating the phrase “I don’t understand it, none of the others have touched bottom.” Thankfully the damage appeared to have been confined to the ‘sacrificial’ bolts mounted directly under the LPG tanks – bolts that I had been told were installed for precisely that reason, to screech a warning of a pending scrape on the tanks.
Later, after I was safely parked on the ferry deck I donned my overalls and slid right under Harvey to have a much closer look at the LPG tanks and, indeed, found them totally undamaged. I then looked at the tow hitch on the trailer and found that not only had the jockey wheel been slightly bent but it’s mounting pillar had been forced upward into the base of the tow-hitch – obviously the tow-hitch had also ‘bounced’ on the step-down of the ramp. The resultant damage was absolutely minimal but it led me to thinking that if I could secure the jockey wheel sufficiently low enough and firm enough, maybe it too could help protect the rear of the Motorhome – just as long as it didn’t do any damage to the tow hitch floor mounting. I do not know whether it has worked, or not, because since that first trip we have never again faced such a severe step-down either on-to, or off-of a loading ramp - but we think we are now much better prepared for that eventuality.
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