If you know me there’s a good chance that you know me as “the guy who drones on about geeky stuff”. And that’s fair. But like most geeks there’s more to me than comics and pop culture and nerdy science stuff.
This is the new iteration of what began as a blog and is now a radio show/podcast. You can listen to the show on Harrogate Community Radio, download it from Soundcloud or search for Geeking with Destination Venus wherever you get your podcasts. (For the sake of clarity Geeking with Destination Venus is the name of my original (and ongoing) podcast about Geek Culture based around the comic shop I own in Harrogate.)
So yes, there is more to me than Geek Culture, but not much...
But at fairly regular intervals my wife – who for the purposes of this will be known as “Mrs Snail” (because when I asked her she was very clear that she preferred to remain anonymous) -and I abandon the bricks and mortar of our suburban Harrogate house and escape along the highways and byways of the United Kingdom with our caravan.
To be clear, and this is important we are not "caravanners" and we do not go "caravanning". I'm not even sure what "caravanning" is, but it seems to me that the point of "caravanning" would be to be in a caravan, and that's not what we're about at all. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who would fit that description.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love our caravan. We’re on our second - It's comfortable, well equipped and it allows us to go to places we would not otherwise get to, and to do it on our own terms. But the caravan is not the point, it's the means.
Anyway.
We call this "Road Snail" because we carry our home on our backs, most definitely not because we are in any way slow. I understand that if you watch a lot of Top Gear and listen to blokes in pubs you may well be labouring under the misapprehension that caravans are in some way an obstruction on the roads. I can't speak for everyone else - but that's certainly not been my experience.
In fact my experience is rather more that I get stuck behind people in cars that I can't overtake – so it may be the case that there has occasionally been a queue behind me, but I have very rarely been at the front. That, however is a subject for another time.
But if this not about “caravanning”, whatever that is, what is it about?
Well, it’s about three things really:
Mostly it’s about the places we go. The UK is a glorious, gorgeous country crammed full of fascinating places and incredible natural beauty. While I confess that we have a serious preference for the north of Scotland we have been all over this sceptred isle and I want to tell you all about it. From the vineyards of Kent and Sussex to the coves of Cornwall. From the heart of London to the thrills of Thurso, I want to share the places we have visited and the sights that we have seen.
It is also about food.
Me and Mrs Snail are serious foodies. When we travel nothing – and I really do mean nothing – is more important than lunch. When parked up in the middle of the Highlands we have been known to make a two hundred mile round trip to hit a favourite restaurant. I want to introduce you to some of the incredible food we have discovered on our travels as well as some of the food we cook for ourselves – there is so much more you can do in a caravan kitchen than sausages and beans.
And then finally, occasionally, it will be about the hardware. About the nuts and bolts of running and maintaining a modern caravan, from towing and manoeuvring to maintenance and repair...
And in fact, that’s where we’re going to start.
Because I never wanted a caravan. Both Mrs Snail and I spent many family holidays in caravans when we were kids. The difference is that she had massive nostalgia for the experience, while I had memories of rain sounding like a bazillion ball bearings being hurled against the roof, squelching across muddy fields to dingy toilet blocks, leaky awnings and a general sense of claustrophobia.
It’s not that I hated my childhood caravan adventures, I didn’t. I just didn’t have any desire to recreate them as an adult.
However, once we had a car that was capable of towing, Mrs Snail made her desire to enjoy a bit of caravan travel very clear. Generally speaking I’m quite conflict averse and I certainly don’t like arguing with my wife, which means that I let her win, and I'm very glad I did.
Back in our pre-caravan days we got up to our favourite place in Scotland for one week every year. Staying in a self catering chalet type thing, one week was all we could afford. Our first caravan (a Lunar Quasar 462, since you ask) represented a serious up-front cost, but once we had it the cost of a week away fell dramatically from nearly a thousand pounds for a week to about a hundred.
That first caravan of ours gave seventeen years of solid service and based in that maths it more than paid for itself.
We loved it. We’d still be using it, but back in the early 2000s when it was built caravans used an awful lot of wood and fibre board. That meant that even the smallest leak could lead to irreparable rot and with much regret in 2024 we had to let it go having been advised that it might well be becoming unsafe to tow. The story of that sale will probably be a subject for discussion for some other time, but for now I want to introduce you to our current little house on wheels. Forgive me for not including photos in this section - I don't appear to have any images of the inside of the 'van and while I could go out onto the drive and take some that would involve tidying it up...
We had really only had one complaint about our first caravan. When we bought it we were in our thirties and the idea of assembling the bed every night and putting it all away in the morning didn’t really seem like much of a chore. Nor did man-handling the caravan around a pitch or along our driveway.
These days, we’re in our fifties. We can claim to be young at heart and insist that age is just a number as much as we like but the truth is we’re older, tireder and significantly less tolerant of physical effort than we used to be.
So we’d come to loathe the necessity of turning the dining room/lounge area into a bed every night. Having to put the damn thing away every morning before we could have breakfast was equally irritating.
As a result when we went shopping for a replacement for the Quasar we were very clear that we were not buying anything that didn’t have a “fixed bed”. If you’re unfamiliar with the parlance a “fixed bed” is exactly what it sounds like – a bed in a caravan that is always up. These can be double or twin, but double seems to be the most popular choice.
Now, the advantages of this – not just the fact that you don’t have to set the thing up and put it away every time you want a bit of shut-eye but also the immense amount of storage that can be accommodated beneath it – are obvious but the disadvantage is also pretty easy to spot.
If you are going to have a bed that is permanently set up in a caravan that is going to take up a lot of space.
That means that you either have to cut something else – a seating area perhaps, or a bathroom – out of your layout or you need to make your caravan a lot bigger. Which is why our new caravan – A Bailey Pegasus Grande Brindisi – is absolutely mahoosive! (That’s a technical term…)
This, obviously is a compromise. Because it’s big it is also heavy. Not as heavy as you’d think, perhaps. Unlike our previous caravan which was mostly a wood and aluminium construction Peg, as we’ve come to know her, is mostly fabricated from what the sales team referred to as “composite material”, by which they meant “many different kinds of plastic”.
For her size she is very lightweight, but since her size is “large” she still weighs about a tonne and a half when she’s loaded up in travelling order.
But we get a lot for that weight. As you walk in through the door there is a spacious L shaped seating area to your left which serves as both lounge and dining area. Immediately in front of you is a kitchen area which features as fridge freezer that’s bigger than the one I had as a student, a gas cooker with oven, grill and four ring hob, a sink, an insanely clever microwave and a small amount of work surface.
As you turn to your right you encounter the bedroom area. Along with a full sized double bed you also get a reasonable amount of storage for clothes and suchlike. Moving further to the back of the ‘van you then have a small but well equipped shower room which contains, as the name suggests, a shower, a sink and a chemical toilet.
At some point we’ll probably talk about the compromises involved in juggling space, weight and appliances, but for now I think it’s enough that you know that’s what we’re travelling with. Gas is provided by the two 6kg as bottles that sit more or less at the centre of the offside of the caravan in a compartment behind the cooker. Electricity is delivered by a powerful and rechargeable “leisure battery” that lives beneath the floor under the bed or, if you’re pitched up somewhere with a power supply via an electrical hook-up.
Lighting is provided by LED lights powered by the battery, the heating, water heater and fridge can be powered either by mains hookup or gas – so the only thing that won’t work if we’re off-grid is the microwave, which we very rarely use in any case. Water comes courtesy 40l barrel which sits outside the ‘van and feeds the taps via an immersion pump.
Essentially what we have is a studio apartment that we can put on the back of the car and take wherever we want to go. And we’ve been everywhere – as far South East as the Essex village of Burnham on Crouch and as far South West as St. Agnes in Cornwall. We have travelled not just to the North Coast of Scotland, but beyond, to the Islands of Orkney, Lewis and Harris. We’ll talk about all of those places and more in the coming episodes.
For now, however, we will focus on our first proper expedition of 2025 when we ventured down to the West Country. We have been members of the Caravan and Motorhome Club since 2007 but we had never been to their site at Dulverton before. Nestling in a corner of the little town of Dulverton on the Somerset/Devon border it is a fairly small but beautifully laid out place to pitch up. All of the pitches have ample space and because the site sits in a little bowl created by the surrounding hills it feels wonderfully sheltered.
To get to the site, however you need to take a hard left as soon as you hit the other side of the bridge and drive a couple of hundred yards along the side of the River Barle, past both the Fire Station and the Police Station as well as the Exmoor National Park Centre and one of Dulverton's three car parks before entering into the caravan site itself.
The site is so discreetly positioned I suspect that many visitors to Dulverton never realise it's there, which I suspect was the intention - the Caravan Club is pretty good at hiding caravans from the landscape.
Once we were checked in and pitched up we set out on our first foray into Dulverton, which is a remarkable little place and something of a hidden gem. Home to around 1500 people (1408, as of the 2011 census if we're going to be precise...) it is very compact, being mostly arranged around two streets. But in spite of its diminutive size, Dulverton packs in a bunch of features that you might be surprised to find in a place three or four times the size.
Walking out of the site back towards the bridge, the first thing you notice is a little statue of Lorna Doone, heroine of the novel by Richard Doddridge Blackmore. The sculpture was donated to the town in 1990 for reasons that neither the attached plaque nor my not insubstantial internet research have been able to discern. Lorna Doone is set on Exmoor of course but the "Lorna Doone" valley is about twenty or so miles to the north east. Now I think about it perhaps it's been sited in this location because it's sort of outside the Exmoor National Park Centre.
Walking on, past the fire and police stations you find yourself back at the bridge, and at the bottom of Dulverton High Street. Here you will find the Bridge Inn, which we did not patronise during our short stay, but which is perfectly situated to attract passing motorists and which looked to me like a perfectly nice place. On the other side of the road is an independent garage that looks as though it may well pre-date cars and a cute little gift shop called “Brimblecombe”.
As you proceed up the high street there is a pretty selection of houses and small shops on the left and a wall on the right bearing a plaque marking the level of the “Great Flood” of 15th and 16th August 1952. It was, clearly one heck of a flood – and one which wreaked havoc elsewhere in the county – the beautiful coastal village of Lynmouth was devastated when the River Lyn, swollen by the same unseasonal summer rainfall burst its banks destroying several buildings and killing thirty four people.
As you carry on upwards past the phone box you come to a fork in the road now the High Street proper or the road called the High Street continues bearing right good along the road and the main road is designed to take you round to your left. This takes you into what we would call the beating commercial heart of Dulverton in that it's where the CO-OP is. It's also where the you'll find a "civic building" with shops underneath.
I should have read up on this more - it is clearly very, very old and has steps leading up to a village hall equivalent space on the 1st floor. As with so many other things on this trip it was closed as tourist season hadn't started. There's also the sort of National Park Information Centre type thing there that was also closed, a lovely little butchers which had local venison and a proper old fashioned green grocer.
There is also the first of the excellent eateries, a little chip shop with a small fish and chip restaurant which looked quite good, couple of sort of Deli type places and other places to eat.
However I stated earlier just how important lunch is to me and Mrs Snail. Dulverton is home to an amazing place calling itself a "bar restaurant" and honestly it's the reason we didn't go to any of the other eating places in town. We went there first and for the rest of our stay we just kept going there because it was so good! It clearly used to be two properties - a house with a shop attached, and going by the photographs in the bar and just a little bit of chatting to local people it used to be a sweet shop called Woods.
Now, still called Woods it's been knocked into one dining space downstairs. As you go in the main door you have a have a bar on the left and then a dining room on the right, although you can sit and eat in the bar as well. It's not big but every time we went it was packed with locals, which is always, I would argue, an extremely good sign.
All of this time the the High Street, which if you recall starts by the river, and so at the bottom of the hill has been climbing. It's not steep but it is still a noticeable hill. You woke up to the very very top of the village and there is the church looking down across all of Dulverton. Just behind the church and sort of slightly to the right there's one of those remarkable antique shops that also sells other stuff where, after years of searching for the right thing, we found a lamp shade for our bedroom at home. Since we did this on the first day it meant that for nearly a week we were driving around with a lampshade on the back of the car, which must've looked pretty strange...
Anyway, we're going to leave you there in Dulverton, standing outside the church, looking out across the town. Next week we're going to dive in to the wonderful food at Woods...
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