We thought it was time for an insight into the Travelling Dilberrys caravan of life i.e. the actual vehicle which has been our home now for over 11 weeks. This blog was due anyway, but a series of unfortunate events in the last few days has brought the subject to top of mind. It all started with a wonky awning, and whilst it hasn’t ended yet, it will do so in the next few days with any luck, but with a reasonable bill for a number of other totally unrelated parts of the motorhome. Or to be more precise, the “camping car”, which is what motorhomes are most often known as in Europe. (They are certainly not known as mobile homes which is a great relief when arriving at some camping grounds when there is a tariff sheet on display which suggests our overnight cost will be something like €80-100….rather than the usual €10-30….until you realise that “mobile homes” are not motorhomes like we are in, but removable houses which exist in little compounds in most campgrounds.)

Anyway, what’s happened lately? As mentioned, the awning that comes out from the side of the van had got a bit skewed and wasn’t locking into place, which is a potential issue as you can’t drive away with it like that. This is apparently a fairly common complaint and we NOW know is dealt with by having one person wind it in, and the other pull slightly on one side to ensure it winds it straight and locks in. At the time however, we (OK, insert the word “Andrew” in place of “we” there) tried to fix the problem with a screwdriver. Not a good idea! Not because the screwdriver itself did any harm, but the person on the end of it did! We ALSO now know that it is not a good idea to stand one foot on one of our Tesco outdoor chairs and the other on the back bumper of the van. Two discoveries here: firstly a supermarket outdoor chair CAN fold completely inside out (and then be reversed back into shape later), and secondly, the back right taillight housing unit on an Adria Coral 650SP is held on with only glue and just ONE screw! How ridiculous is that?

It is now currently held on however with about 200 metres of gaffer tape, and will remain so until we can get a replacement unit installed with a bit more permanency than the original. Fortunately, it’s only the housing and not the actual lights themselves as that would be REALLY expensive! But…..speaking of the actual lights themselves, there is the small problem of the back LEFT unit, which someone (not us I hasten to add) mysteriously and anonymously managed to crack at some stage recently, presumably in a carpark somewhere. It’s not too bad, but probably wouldn’t pass a warrant in NZ…..not sure about in the UK, when the “MOT” is next due.

The day after the bumper incident, we (Pauline) opened one of the cupboards in the bathroom. You know how the airline crews always warn you about taking care when opening the overhead lockers because items may have moved in flight blah, blah, blah? Well, the same warning should apply to camping car cupboards. A bottle of perfume tumbled out, dropped straight into the little basin and smashed a hole straight through it! Makes the basin a long way short of watertight, that’s for sure! Fortunately, and I know you’re all concerned about this, the perfume was unscathed! We’d already noticed that a previous owner of the van had used something to clean the basin which had discoloured it a bit and had also made it somewhat brittle – now we know just how brittle it was!

So replacement part number two is needed: a bathroom basin unit for a 2004 Adria Coral. Fingers crossed for our visits tomorrow (well, just one visit hopefully, not visits….) to local French Adria dealers that we may find both parts in stock and able to be installed fairly smartly.

Then there’s the minor things….
~ the kitchen window blind which will go up but not down again
~ the cover off the electrical socket on the outside which some Lithuanian vandal thought they’d quite like. They did leave half the hinge behind though, so I’m not sure how useful the bit they did break off is to them
~ the hole in the front windscreen blind which (yes, me again) I put in it in Sweden back in July when I thought it would be cool to have our New Zealand flag on display whilst the blind was up. Another idea which turned out to be not so smart in hindsight: how was I to know that when I accidentally let the corner of the flag slip a little, the eyelet in that corner would wind in with the blind, which then became utterly immovable in either direction? And how was I to know that the only way to get it out – using a combination of brute force, an egg slice and yes, you guessed it, a screwdriver – would leave holes in the blind when I eventually did get it to unroll as designed?
~ the additional racing stripes added to the side of the van the other day when the trees along the side of the driveway at a campsite at Gourdes in the South of France proved NOT to be the type that bend gracefully out of the way and just wipe any excess dust off your vehicle, but more the type that are competely unyielding and are designed to remove paint rather than dust! Hopefully a cut and polish will minimise that one….time will tell.
~ when you open the side door, and want it to stay open, you can click it into place with a catch on the door that clicks into a holder on the outside wall. That worked perfectly well – once! The first time we used it and then wanted to close the door again, one of us (me, quite probably….OK, yes it was me!) pulled the door as it is designed to be pulled, and with it came not only the catch as expected, but the holder and the two screws as well! That was on day 1 – today is day 80 and I still haven’t fixed that one. I have however invented a little string thing that keeps the door open perfectly well!
~ last but not least, the side hatch which leads into what we call “under the house” which is the large storage locker under the bed but accessible from outside where we keep our suitcases, our supplies of bottled water, wine, toilet paper, the outdoor table and chairs, the 25m electrical cord, an empty gas cylinder, pegs, a clothes rack, the toolkit (complete with screwdrivers as you’ll have noted), the water hose, a sign which you use to reserve your spot when you leave a campsite (that one is on long term loan from the most expensive camp in Scandinavia – it was the least they could do after charging us like wounded bulls to stay in their camp). Anyway…the hatch. This is how it works….it stays open on its catch perfectly well for hours on end when no human is nearby, but as soon as one of us sticks our head in the locker to get something out – whammo! Down comes the hatch, with considerable weight and force, right onto your head!

So enough of all that….these are all minor things really when viewed in the context of 15,292km so far across 20 European countries – the campervan actually performs really well: it has the most comfortable bed, heaps of storage so we have a nook or a cranny for everything, a compact but perfectly adequate bathroom (albeit with a self draining basin at present), very reliable and smooth running mechanics, it uses next to no oil, we get 25 miles to the gallon of diesel, it comes complete with an efficient driver and a gourmet cook both of whom can, but rarely do, understudy each other, and it’s our home! We like it very much, and will miss it come the end of January!

Oh, and one other thing it comes with….the new female in my life, Karen. Karen is the Australian voice of our TomTom GPS system, which is an iPad app that has proved to be almost brilliant. She has very accurately and politely taken us across thousands of kilometres of Europe with next to no navigational incidents , but why only almost brilliant? Well, for starters, she doesn’t always allow for the fact that motorhomes are generally wider and higher than cars – the other day she insisted we should take a street in Paris despite me explaining very clearly to her, more than once, that our 2.6m high vehicle was NOT going to fit under a 1.9m barrier. She also has an annoying habit of picking up our walking motion on GPS and saying, always very loudly for everyone to hear, just as we enter McDonalds with the iPads under our arms to check emails etc., something like “turn around in 200m on Rue d’Embarrassment, and take the next left”. Shows how accurate the GPS is though! And in Bruxelles on a Friday evening, she took us to what was supposed to be a camp in what turned out to be the heart the CBD, but turned out to be, we think, the HQ offices of the Belgian Camping Association. That last one isn’t Karen’s fault though….like any computer, it’s “garbage in, garbage out”.

Best of all though, is her uniquely Australian way of pronouncing addresses and placenames, especially French ones. Rue de l’Eglise doesn’t come out as “rue de lay gleeze” but “roo de leg lies”; Fontainebleau was “fon-tain-a-blow”; Lyon of course is “Lion”; Nice wasn’t “niece” but “nice”; and luckily when we were in Tuscany last week, she didn’t ask us to travel through the town of Fucécchio….

Enough for now, once again it’s high time I went to bed before a big day of tracking down spare parts for camper vans tomorrow. This blog post was supposed to be accompanied by a few photos of our home on wheels, but as is often the case here, Internet uploads are dreadfully slow, so the pictures will have to be posted another time.

All the best – from Andrew, Pauline and Karen