Life in a Caravan

We've been on the road 5 weeks now, and have settled pretty comfortably into the caravanning life. We share all the driving, breaking up our journeys into fairly short shifts of no more than 1.5 hours each. We've planned not to do very long journeys in any one day, but we've found that out here its hard to actually get anywhere worth getting to sometimes, so we'll throw in a long day occasionally in the future.

One of the secrets of caravanning happiness is 'a place for everything and everything in its place'. There just isn't enough room to afford clutter, and with cupboards and drawers fairly full you don't want to be rummaging all the time. We have boxes within boxes and bags within bags - a box of small hardware items in a larger box with other small boxes of things in it for instance. This way you can find everything fairly quickly and with the minimum disruption to everything else.

We now have the hitching up and setting up in a new place routines down to a fine art. We each have our jobs, and we each check that the other person has done their job properly. We have a hitch up checklist to make sure that we don't miss anything, and that there is no chance of anything being left loose that might cause damage. Hitching up takes us about half an hour, as does setting up in a new place, once the van is on the site. Getting the van onto the site can take anything from 30 seconds to a very tense ...... well, who knows how long it could take, but at least we haven't had any shouting matches in the midle of the caravan park as we have seen with at least one other couple. We're getting a lot better at backing into sites, but we still fervently hope for a drive through whenever we arrive at a new place!

The worst part about caravanning life is the park bathrooms. Thank heavens for the loo in the van so we don't have to go out in the middle of the night, but we still rely on the park facilities for daytime visits and bathing . These range from clean and functional to decidedly grotty, sometimes you have to run around under the shower in order to get wet, but somehow the same shower manages to soak your towel, clothes and toiletries bag. Wherever we can we get an ensuite site, which gives us a small private bathroom next to the caravan. These are a little more expensive than an ordinary powered site, but you can unpack your toiletries and towel, and you generally (although not always) get more room. Also you don't have far to go - some of the parks we've been at have had the facilities miles away!

All in all, we feel we're no longer novices at the game, although we've still got a bit to go before we can call ourselves experts. Hopefully we're starting to run out of silly mistakes to make!