Well it's been an exciting week for the new caravan. (Apologies to those bored by caravans, skip ahead now). We picked it up Monday afternoon, with much tedious paperwork to fill out and about 30 minutes of handover/training on how everything worked. I then brought proceedings to a halt by accidentally breaking the door stay that holds the door open - the wind blew the door out of my hand and I reflexively caught it back, which wrenched the stay off the wall of the van. The salesman took it well, just picking up the pieces and disappearing with them to find the man who fixes things. I meanwhile poked the dabs of sealant on the remains stuck to the caravan, and was surprised to find them somewhat malleable. This eventually awoke deep suspicions in my mind that I was not the first to break the stay off and it had perhaps been previously repaired. But anyway, the fix-it man arrived and immediately asked 'where's the little spring?'. We hadn't seen a spring with the components so started peering at the hard standing around the caravan, with more people joining in until eventually about seven of us were pacing around studying the ground closely. I was actually the one to find the little spring - I would have felt proud if it weren't my fault in the first place. It took Mr Fix-it about 45 minutes to get the door stay back onto the van due to having to find fatter-but-not-longer screws and avoiding gumming up the spring with adhesive etc. We were told not to use the door stay for 24 hours and are still terrified of it to this day and treat it like glass.
By this point the two of us were tired and fairly fed up, and not pleased to find it was starting to rain as we drove the short distance to the nearby campground I had booked. DH did amazingly well with his first towing experience in about 15 years, and we managed to reverse the caravan onto our pitch. We plugged in the electric cable and just sat inside marvelling at our new little world until it stopped raining. The rest of the evening and the next morning were a cascade of new discoveries and problem solving and much peering at manuals. But we managed it all and the new van is brilliant. Before we left the site the next day, we practiced reversing onto several pitches until we were getting the hang of it better. We had an uneventful drive to the storage site and managed to slot it into its allotted space before putting it all to bed for the week.
This weekend we actually took it on a holiday break to a site near Cambridge, as it was a bank holiday weekend. Because I had booked so late, we could only get a non-serviced grass pitch so were operating self-sufficiently just off our own battery and gas. But it all worked really well and we enjoyed two good nights and brilliant sunshine. So far we are really enjoying being caravan owners.
We spent most of Sunday doing a self-guided walk around the outskirts of Cambridge and along the Backs of the river, really relaxing and surprisingly rural. We saw cows and lots of punts, and quite a few birds including this adorable swan family. And I was surprised to see several people swimming in the river - where we used to live, the Thames was too dangerous to swim in because of Weil's disease. Perhaps it is cleaner in Cambridgeshire. After so long of having cold rainy weather, it finally feels like summer and we had a lovely time. We've already planning more breaks for later in the summer.
I also made a start on a knitted lace doiley from the book I posted about last week, using DMC Cebelia 20 and some 1.5mm metal DPNs. This turned out to be virtually impossible, with multiple restarts and false starts. The cotton yarn is very unforgiving when you trying to increase from a circular/central start, the metal needles constantly fall out of the cotton stitches or get twisted around so that you are accidentally knitting the end stitch instead of the beginning stitch (when there are only a couple of stitches on each needle to start), the whole affair was like juggling with string. To make it even more difficult, the Danish book uses non-standard charting conventions which require much looking at the chart key at the front and a certain amount of guess work. I eventually gave up on the first pattern I had chosen and switched to a much smaller doiley near the front of the book. I also went and found my 1.5mm glove needles (which are much shorter) to decrease the physical difficulty level. I have now managed to finally knit a small circle of stitches about 1 1/2 inches wide and am feeling very proud of myself.
1 comment:
Ahh no pics of the interior? Our first trip was two weeks and a big mistake. We should have done shorter trips at first. Sounds like you had a lovely time.
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