Through the Keyhole at Beacon Hill

Our pitch was called Keyhole 7, hence the title of this post. Tricia's daughter Emma arrived with her little boy, Charlie, on the 27th of May and we were then kept pretty busy entertaining him but the site has a play area and a pool, both of which helped.

I finally decided on a motorcycle trailer from Indespension for dragging our bikes around and I took a run down to Southampton to give them our requirements. They built the trailer on Wednesday (the 2nd) but I couldn't get it collected until Friday the 4th. When we collected it it had a spare wheel but no carrier and no deck rings. We had to wait while the deck rings were fitted but the spare wheel carrier had not been delivered so they said they would post it on. When we got it back to the site I checked out the electrics only to find that the socket on the towbar was a real bodge job. With a bit of fiddling around I did managed to get the correct lights working most of the time.

On Saturday we packed up Harvey and, accompanied by Emma and Charlie, and towing the trailer with the bikes on board we headed for Gate House Wood near Sevenoaks in Kent. The journey was uneventful and when we arrived we found that the site is located in an old quarry and surrounded by quite a high bank (not good for TV or mobile phone reception). It is very well kept, with trees and shrubs around the pitches and a modern, clean facilities block.

The main reason for being in Kent is to do a four day LGV driving course which we started on Tuesday the 8th at 08:00. We got thrown straight in at the deep end driving an 18ton Scannia with a range change gearbox (an eight speed box split into high and low range and selected with a switch on the gear stick). We were pretty knackered by the time we finished at 16:00 and that was the pattern for the next three days too. We had a break over the weekend and tried to just relax and not worry about the driving. We had a lovely afternoon with some fiends in Bexhill-on-Sea on Sunday. On Monday we did some more practice and we took our tests in the afternoon. Unfortunately we both failed! We had a real Ogress of an examiner and we both failed pretty much on our use of the gearbox.

The rest of the week would have been doom and gloom but for a visit from our friends from Bexhill who spent the night camping in Harvey. I did manage to replace the dodgy trailer socket wiring with a piece of 7-core cable and get things working better but in the process found that there was a problem with wiring of the side lights on the trailer. The cable had been stripped at one place and trapped by a bolt in another. So the feed for the side lights had to be disconnected again. Indespension have ordered a new wiring loom for me but it will take four weeks to arrive so they are sending a complimentary tailer board on to our next site.

On Saturday we packed up Harvey again, hitched up the trailer and headed for the site entrance and the Motor Home Service point. We had to dump the tanks before leaving (a task we have pretty much mastered now, especially when there is a purpose built dump point as at Gate House Wood). We had to drop the trailer off and reverse up to the dump point so hadn't checked the electrics. After dumping and re-hitching the trailer we found that the brake lights weren't working on the van or the trailer. After about half an hour I found that the Scotch-lock connecting the US wiring to the UK light clusters was badly corroded and, after moving it farther along the conductor, got them working again.

Everything was going well on the journey (too well, perhaps!), and we were making good time, until we were cruising along the M40 and there was a loud bang and some crashing from the roof. A truck following some way behind started flashing his lights so I pulled off onto the hard shoulder and, risking life and limb, climbed up on the roof for a look. What I found was that the plastic cover for the front aircon unit had been ripped clean off. We decided that there wasn't anything we could do so we continued on.

We arrived at Green Hill Farm at around 16:30 and got ourselves set-up on our pitch. This is another well kept site near the village of Bletchingdon in Oxfordshire. We will be here for four nights in order to take Harvey up to LAS Motorhome Maintenance on Tuesday for them to look at our leveling jacks again.

 

On Wednesday we will be off to Hanley Swan near Worcester for a couple of weeks.

A short trip to our next stop

After a bit of shunting about at Huntick farm, we have now moved to our new location of Beacon Hill Touring Park about a mile up the road. This is a much larger site than Huntick Farm and, being the Bank Holiday weekend, it is mobbed with families. There are tents and caravans everywhere, on just about every spare inch of grass. We have Tricia's Daughter and Grandson staying with us and Charlie can recommend the paddling pool. The site is also surrounded by woods so there are plenty of places to explore. We are going to be here for the next week and then we will move on to Kent.

Up to the elbows in brown stuff

If anyone has seen the comedy film RV with Robin Williams they will understand that there comes a time that the holding tanks require emptying. Now, I didn't want to bore you all with the details but some friends of ours suggested, after having the saga related to them, that we should share the experience.

It all starts back at Hogleaze really. This was the storage facility that we were using near Dorchester. When it came time to move from there to our current location it was decided to do some maintenance on the van. One of these jobs was to sanitise the fresh water tank. This entailed pouring an anti-everything agent into the tank, filling it up with fresh water and letting it stand for thirty minutes. When the time was up the water had to be flushed into the holding tanks through all the various pipes in the plumbing system. This filled up the holding tanks, of course, but we had already checked that Hogleaze had a dumping point. What we didn't realise was that the access to the dumping point is at the side of the road and higher than our vehicle. The outlet from the holding tanks is gravity fed!

Oh, well. Not to worry we would dump our tanks when we got to Huntick Farm. Except that they don't have a drive over dump point either. So we used the loo but tried not to put too much water down the sink. Doing the washing up in the toilet block on the site and showering at home. After a couple of weeks of this we decided we had to do something about dumping the tanks, especially when the black water tank suddenly looked as if it was full, so we aproached another site that we new had the facility and asked if we could use it. They said we couldn't, we offered them money, they said they would get back to us. They didn't get back to us so we had a brain wave and booked in for a night at their most basic rate. That was OK and we duly turned up and were directed to the dump point.

When we attempted to connect the hose to the junction things went a bit horrific. The dump valve for one of the tanks had leaked and when the cap was removed all this extremely smelly liquid started to run out. Luckily we had bucket! With this drained we managed to get the hose connected and commenced to drain, what I thought was the black water tank. To ensure it was all gone I asked Tricia to have a look down the loo. She immediately shouted that the tank was still full and, having put some more water in, it was now filling the pedestal. We decided it must be blocked and when I went have a look there was Tricia with the loo brush almost entirely inserted into the loo. Thank goodness for surgical gloves!

Anyway, this was not doing any good and we were in danger of losing the loo brush, so we decided to dump what I thought was the grey water tank and leave the blockage for the moment. It was amazing then, that when I opened the grey water dump valve the blockage immediately cleared. Hey, ho. That's the last time I believe the labels on the side of the van. Some extremely funny person must have switched them at some point. Having now completed the operation we returned to Huntick Farm a little wiser and a lot smellier than we left.

It's Started!

I retired as planned on the 31st of March and we moved Harvey from storage to our first site, Huntick Farm Caravan Park, on the 1st of April. We are now living in the van but the process of moving all our belongings in is ongoing. We are also clearing the house ready for renting which will take another few weeks. Once this is done we will plan our next move and the start of our UK tour.

A New Year

Well here we are in 2010 and I am now almost a month into my notice period so it is real now. Retirement will happen on the 31st of March.

At the moment our plan is to move onto a touring site near to home at the end of March and get the house ready to rent. We are then going to start by doing a leisurely tour of the UK aiming to be back in the south when the MOT is due in September.

Once the RV is serviced and MOT'd we will be off across the channel and the adventure will begin in earnest.

In the meantime there are still lots of questions to be answered and lots of things to buy for the new life.

The Idea

The idea was to leave these shores and take up residence somewhere in Europe where living was cheaper and we would be unencumbered by the increasingly Nanny State. Since this is a huge step and we were unsure of where we would like to live in Europe we decided to do a bit of travelling first. Explore the land, meet the people, drink the wine, etc., etc.

We thought that the best way to do this would be in a motorhome, so some research was done and a short trip was taken in a rented motorhome. All this brought us to a decision that, if we were to live comfortably for several months, we needed a large motorhome. This lead to exploring the American RV market. There are many and varied American RV's large enough to call home for several years never mind months but we decided that the criteria should be that it had a four-seater dining area and that it would have at least one slide-out. A slide-out being an area of the side of the vehicle that moves outwards when stationary thus expanding the living or sleeping area by a considerable amount.

All this was being thought about, discussed and dreams dreamed about two years ago but things took a turn towards reality when I decided that I would retire before the law changed in 2010. This meant we could start to make more definite plans and we began looking around for a suitable RV.

Tricia and I both ride motorbikes so any solution would have to include being able to tow a trailer for the bikes.

We checked out the forums, bought magazines and even a book on the subject and, despite the warnings about American RV's, we purchased a Fourwinds Hurricane. This is an almost 34' long coach that will sleep up to six people. It has a king size bed in the rear bedroom and a proper toilet with a shower. It has a gross weight of just over eight tonnes so we are going to be getting our LGV licenses in the New Year.

In the first week of December I put in my request for early retirement so my last day of work will be Wednesday the 31st of March. The plan, as it stands now, is to move into the RV and rent out the house. We will then do a tour of the UK to ensure that everything is in top working order and we haven't omitted anything essential. After that it will be off on the ferry for France.

I intend to use this blog as a means of keeping friends and family informed of our progress. There may not be much change on here before March next year since that is when the adventure starts.