Our Bob Is An Awesome Bob!

Last weekend we popped up to the Midlands to visit family and do a few little post-holiday jobs on Bob. (The re-tuning needed after Techenders was done, along with a service, by the VW Bulli Barn before we set off for Europe.)

The windscreen washers had developed a small leak and so they were sorted by Dad, who also re-wired the cigarette lighter so the cables weren’t so untidy behind the clothes cupboard and we could keep charging phones/cameras/iPods etc. without fear of yanking a cable out when we put a t-shirt away!

We also popped down to Worcester to see a friend of ours, Laura Mott, exhibit some of her photos at The Boston Tea Party café. It’s been great over the past year to be able to go places in Bob without any fear of a breakdown. Sunny day, fun camper, good company, smiles all round.

Today Bob’s at the VW Bulli Barn for an MOT before we put her up for sale. With heavy heart we’ve decided that selling Bob is for the best -there’ll be more info in a future post.

Here we go then, a picture heavy description of our holiday. We had planned to do a 5-country epic but decided that within the timeframe and in a VW and with a 10-month old baby it was too much travelling, so it was to be ‘just’ Belgium & France.

We packed up on the Sunday and set off at 5am to get the Norfolkline ferry to Dunkirk. All went well with that and by early afternoon we were at our first site in Brugge.

I’d not been to Brugge since 2000 (and then as a member of staff of a secondary school football tour) but my fond memories of it were not let down. We had a lovely time walking around the shops and (expensive) cafes, and of course visited the church that claims to contain an amount of Jesus’ blood. Didn’t bother queueing to see it though! We stopped at Camping Membling which was a compact but clean site with a bus stop to the centre of Brugge close by but just about walkable anyway. We’d recommend it.

After a couple of nights there we hit the road. I love continental roads…

…before stopping in Ypres.

This site was Jeugstadion Ieper which again we’d recommend. Small, quiet and very new it was crucially very close to the centre of Ypres so an easy walk to see things. Ypres is, obviously, dominated by its role in WW1 and it’s hard to believe that most of it is less than 100 years old with them having rebuilt it all. We only stayed one night (visiting Tyne Cot Cemetary on the onward journey) so didn’t use the awning. I’m not sure how it would have fitted on the sloping pitch anyway! It was out first night with all 4 of us in Bob, and although I’m not going to pretend it was spacious it was certainly comfortable enough.

Next we were heading for Paris, but we stayed one night in Le Nouvion en Thierache in Northern France to break up the journey. It was a long and tiring trip which saw us get lost on several occasions trying to avoid long stretches of autoroute and/or city centres. By the time we arrived at the municipal campsite (it doesn’t have a website but you can Google a review site with it listed) we were exhausted.

The site was next to a lake and I’m sure with better weather it would have been lovely. It was clean and spacious but curiously although there were lots of full pitches there didn’t seem to be anyone around. It quickly became known as the ‘creepy site’ and the next day we left earlyish to make good time for the capital.

On the way to Paris we stopped off in the tiny village I sadly can’t remember the name of now.

We made several of these stops during the holiday because L, although astonishingly happy to sit in the front and doze whilst travelling, sometimes just needed to feed! We popped into a typically lovely bakery and had some very nice cakes!

And then it was Paris and the Boulevard Périphérique. Bob had been brilliant up to this point, using a little oil as VWs do but not missing a beat. I was a little worried about Paris though because it’s not a place you want to break down.

I needn’t have worried. In the end it was relatively easy and Bob was great. We arrived at Bois de Boulogne campsite in Paris and once we had sorted a suitably sized pitch we set up camp and made sure Liesel didn’t eat any gravel! We put the awning up this time. It does make such a difference with L as H & I slept in it with L (downstairs) and A (upstairs) in Bob giving us far more room to move around. We had pitching it down to a fine art in the end!

The Bois de Boulogne campsite is very convenient with shuttle buses to the centre of Paris but other than that it was not a particularly pleasant site. The small shop was charging €4 for a loaf of bread and there were many people trying to find shops elsewhere to stock up – there aren’t any. The pitches are almost all gravel and are very close together. The toilets/showers were like prison blocks and not clean. But they were close to our pitch and we weren’t in for most of the day to hear the recorded advert for river cruises in umpteen different languages that they played between 9am and 7pm…

Paris was great though. We walked the whole length of the Champs-Élysées and went to the Louvre, Eiffel Tower and the lovely Montmatre area with the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. We had to keep telling ourselves ‘we’re only in Paris once’ when the bills came, but the sense of Paris being a romantic city got to me in the end, especially walking up from the Place de la Concorde.

Three nights in Paris and it was back up north again, stopping in Poix de Picardie to break up the journey to the Normandy coast. The campsite was fantastic, our favourite of the holiday.

Clean, friendly, quiet, private, wonderful! “Choose any pitch!” they said and they allowed us to hook up to the electric for free! They also had a washing machine which in hindsite we wish we’d made more use of. If you’re in the area you could do a lot worse than this site. Our favourite.

Next it was the coast and La Dune Blanche campsite in Camiens, just down the coast from Boulogne. One word : don’t. It looks great on the website and we’d booked a week there in advance on the back of it. No shop or washing machine, a 15 minute round trip to the toilet block and the nastiest ‘sanitary’ facilities I’ve ever seen. I could write a page about the horrors but I won’t – suffice to say that we left two nights early and seriously investigated leaving after one night, even though we’d already paid and would have been throwing away money. It was that bad. It did, as its sole positive feature, provide us with our loveliest pitch.

On the dunes with trees all around, with lots of wildlife (frogs, sea birds, lovely fruiting plum tree!) it was idylic. Such a shame that the rest of the site was so rubbish. It wasn’t even anywhere near the sea despite the dunes.

We did visit Nausicaa in Boulogne when we were there though which was very enjoyable, and made all the more so by some locals helping us around the parking difficulties. This is where a couple of men having their lunch assured me it was OK to park:

And it was OK, an inch away from a bottle recycling bin with Bob’s big orange backside sticking out into the car park! We had lots of admiring glances during the holidays and lots of fellow campers in their enormous white monster-campers coming over and having a chat about Bob. It was lovely and again very nice to hear people saying such positive things about your mode of transport. Never happened last time in the Picasso!

We also went to La Touquet which we were all (especially A) very taken with. We ate at the Marrakech restaurant (several vegetarian dishes to choose from – in France!) which we highly recommend. The beach is great too and unlike some French towns it has a good number of shops to browse through too.

Moving on towards Wissant we found everywhere almost full and so were relieved to find the clean, facility-rich site in Audinghen called Camping Municipal du Musée. Like most municial sites it doesn’t have it’s own website but there are review sites out there. Very friendly and even without the horrors of the previous week a good place to stay, if not near a sandy beach.

We spent our last day in Wissant, a little town that has become more and more busy as people have discovered its beauty so close to Calais. It was Wednesday and so market day and we had an enjoyable time browsing and buying local French produce.

We parked up (can you see the white cliffs of Dover in the background?) and spent the day on the beach relaxing before the journey home.

Bob had performed wonderfully, never once giving me (the sole driver by choice!) a moment’s worry. Sure she idiosyncratic, but aren’t they all? She had also provided (along with the awning when we’d used it) superb accomodation for the four of us for almost three weeks. She had one more test on the journey home though. An accident had closed both Dartford Crossing Tunnels. It took us nearly 7 hours to get from Dover to north Essex and for about two of those we were in stop-start or stationary traffic, which again Bob handled without a care.

When we finally arrived home we were too tired and numb from the journey from Dover to really reflect on our holiday but the night before, when we were speculating if we would do over 1000 miles and were looking back on our continental holiday in Bob, we were filled with an awful lot of happiness and an enormous amount of pride that we’d done it in a VW Camper with whom our first few months had been so demoralising, and yet now had performed flawlessly to give us a holiday we’ll never forget.

If there’s anyone still reading I apologise for the length of this post and for waffling but…we had a had a great time and I wanted to share a fantastic VW experience.

Last weekend we decided to get away for the weekend and chose Black Barns Farm Campsite near Burham-on-Crouch & Maldon.

It’s a lovely small site, very friendly & quiet. We went there just to get away from it all, and it’s great if you just want to sit around and relax or are passing through.

http://www.blackbarnsfarm.co.uk

Website says £7 but it’s now £10. Showers, toilets, wash basins, free use of freezer. There’s an electrical hook-up & a tap.

The pitches are near to the chickens, guinea fowl & ducks and you can buy eggs from the site.

Views across the the River Blackwater estuary are great, and it’s where we took this picture:

Bob was great again, and it gave us a useful trial run to perfect sleeping arrangements with a baby so we’re sorted for Europe in the summer.

Have a go!

Techenders is a technical weekend organised through the Just Kampers Forum. We would have gone to Techenders 13 but we were in Bali and L was born two days after Techenders 14 – we’ve been waiting to attend one for over a year. Techenders 15 was our first foray into weekend ‘meets’ and we were a little bit nervous of what to expect, after all what do we have in common with the other people beyond ownership of a VW Camper?  The meet was held in Leicestershire and despite putting our names down several months in advance we only decided for certain to go the weekend before.

Bob had only been back on the road a week and so I did a few test runs to make sure she was OK, and then on the Friday we took her out and washed her with a pressure hose and cleaned and hoovered her interior. After stocking her up with food and clothes she was ready.

The trip up to Techenders was fantastic. A little cold as it was an early-ish start but no rain, no wind, not much traffic and Bob running like a dream. We arrived without having to stop and with L contentedly staring at me, transfixed by my mirrored aviators! With only a rock & roll bed in the back I had the pleasure of L‘s company in the front which, for most of the time, was lovely. We parked up next to a smart looking T25 and nervously looked around at the Splitty, assorted T2s, T25s, T4s & an original Beetle and wondered how we should introduce ourselves and who to. That problem was solved as almost immediately ‘Superhands’ came over and after saying nice things about Bob showed us how our fuel tank vent pipe was badly split and needed replacing. If we found out nothing else during the weekend…

As a picture to capture the sense of Techenders 15 this is pretty rubbish (I didn’t get around to taking a picture from the other side with all the other vans in the background!) but it does show us camped up so it’s something! Saturday was spent watching other people service and repair their vans. There were people making a custom interior, others doing services and more trying to tune and improve the way their vans ran. By the time we arrived there was already one engine out due to a clutch being replaced, and by Saturday afternoon a routine carb replacement had turned into engine out number 2! (Both vans drove home by Sunday afternoon.) Lunch was a vegetable chilli made by another Techender and was enjoyed by all including L who seems to love spicy food.

Saturday evening H took L to bed in the roof and I stayed up to have a couple of beers around the camp fire with the others. L‘s first night camping went well for her as she was well wrapped up in her grobag and I was OK downstairs on the rock & roll bed in the double sleeping bag, but H was freezing in A‘s single sleeping bag and didn’t sleep well at all. Next time I’ll have the smaller sleeping bag as I don’t feel the cold so much, but it was also a reminder that there’s only canvas between you and the outside temperature when you’re up top.

Sunday was much colder and saw several people who had been there since the Friday gradually leave as they finished sorting their vans. We had a go at some tuning and Bob’s running speed was altered somewhat. Although she was running well, a go with the strobe showed the timing to be too far advanced. Dad came up to to have lunch with us and after saying our goodbyes to the other Techenders we left with a list of small but important jobs to do and reassurances that Bob is actually the very nice van we hoped & thought she was.

The journey home wasn’t quite as relaxing as the one to Techenders. L was tired and irritable, I was just tired and the crosswinds… The A14 isn’t a good road to drive a vehicle with ridiculous aerodynamics on and after the previous day’s chilled driving I was constantly on my guard for Bob being blown around. L picked up on my apprehension and that made her worse. Eventually the wind died down, we got off the A14 and after a couple of feeds L was much happier. As for Bob, well an occasional misfire suggests that she has been tuned down a little too far so I’ll have to sort that soon along with the rest of the  jobs list, but otherwise she was great. Again.

Techenders 15 was a very enjoyable weekend. It was great to spend time with other people who ‘get’ what it is about a VW Camper that makes them special (and that was enough to have in common to get along) and it was an opportunity (taken) for H & I to learn a lot more about how to keep Bob running well. It also pushed me towards wanting to take Bob onto the continent this summer. It’s the vibe, it does things to the mind…

So…great company, great vans, great camping – roll on Techenders 16 in September!

We’ve been looking for baths for quite a while now. The plan is to build on the success of our first bath (from our bathroom refit) in growing vegetables – we want to use them as ready-made raised beds. Good second-hand baths get sold on eBay for lots of money & bad second-hand baths get thrown in skips. Eventually, after many requests on Freecycle, one turned up! At last a second bath for the garden!

A bath is too big to fit in the back of the Picasso so it would have to be Bob making the 60-mile round trip, just a day after being put back on the road. As has been so often the case during our time with Bob she didn’t miss a beat…bath picked up and delivered back home without any problems. Good old Bob, you can have a carrot when they’ve grown…

Bob & Mandy (for that’s what I call her in my head – take this to be an official announcement!) meet for the first time!

Alfie & I (assisted by Dad via live ‘phone link-up) got Bob going after 6 months of hibernation. I believe we flooded her at first but she got going soon enough and drove (almost) flawlessly round the estate whilst being moved between our front and rear gardens. Almost flawlessly because she’s never liked low revs & first gear when she’s cold and after 6 months asleep it was more obvious than ever. She didn’t cut out though and the brakes were fine. In hi-tech news you may notice the solar battery trickle-charger in the side window – works a treat!

I’m going to take her out for a small drive today where I’ll do the tyre pressures and fill her with fuel, and then tomorrow it’s off on a longer run to pick up a bath for the garden. She’ll probably need a clean too.

This is the first time I’ve ever woken something from hibernation and years of watching the Blue Peter tortoise in my youth make me want to go and rub a damp cotton bud over Bob’s lights. Maybe I’ll just polish the chrome eyelids instead…

Bob will soon be back on the road! Bring on April 1st!

Bob’s asleep for winter under her Just Kampers cover. Come the Spring I’ll start getting her ready for a lot more use next year.

Many, many months ago I promised some pictures from our first holiday outings in Bob.

Here goes…

Playing cards in rainy Wiltshire having been to see Stonehenge on our way to North Devon. Our first night all together in Bob!

Next, at our campsite in Devon with J‘s van getting off to a smokin’ start!

It was the first time we’d tried the awning and because we were doing a fair bit of driving around we didn’t attach it.

We went into Exmoor to visit the village H‘s parents lived in and had a picnic :

but only after a lengthy spell sat behind the locals!

We did the Devon-Essex run in one run which took about 10 hours as I had to keep stopping to rest.

After a day of washing and clearing out Bob we were off again to a woodland campsite in Suffolk. As we weren’t planning to move Bob for the week we fixed up the awning to Bob for the first time. It was very useful, especially as H‘s sister and her family were camping on the plot next to us and we had lots of bikes and toys to store.

Overall then two weeks of enjoyable camping and 1200+ miles covered without a hitch, made all the sweeter after the problems we’ve had with Bob. She did us proud though and we’re thinking about Europe next year with Liesel!