If you own a caravan it's pretty much certain that you're
going to drive to most of your holiday destinations. There are two ways of
looking at the drive you take to get where you're going. You can regard it as a chore - and many
people do. "Oooooh, that's a long
drive" people say when you tell them where you're going, presumably
because they think you haven't realised. Alternatively, you can embrace the
journey as a part of the holiday experience, relax, and enjoy it. After all,
when you're towing a caravan if you're going to travel any sort of distance at
all you're going to be spending a fair proportion of your day in the car.
The reason for this is simple - there's no such thing as a
racing caravan*. Even on motorways you're restricted to sixty miles per hour.
On regular roads the limit is fifty - and while towing isn't nearly as
difficult as many people seem to think, if the road is hilly or twisty or both,
then you're not going to be pushing the pedal to the metal and throwing your
outfit around like it was a sports car. It's a simple fact of life - a journey
with a caravan on the back of the car will always take longer than a journey in
a car that doesn't have a one bedroom
flat attached to the bumper.
So yes, you can choose to regard your caravan as a big,
white parachute fixed to the back of the car, slowing you down and making every
narrow lane or sharp bend a white knuckled buttock clenching challenge. But if
you're going to think like that, you might want to consider the possibility
that the caravan lifestyle might not be for you. Get yourself a motor home,
or a tent. Or a hotel. Because if you view towing your
'van as a chore, wherever you're going
you'll get there tired, worn out and thoroughly pissed off. And you know
what? You're supposed to be on holiday.
So revel in the
fact that you have a one bedroom flat with you. Use it. The highways and byways of Britain are strewn with lay-bys
(something particularly true of Scotland, about which more later) so when
you've been driving for a few hours find one with a nice view and stop for a
bit. Make yourself a cup of tea**. Cook yourself a spot of lunch! Remember,
you've got a one bedroom flat with you, which means there's a kitchen. No luke
warm brew from a thermos and a curled up sarnie for you - just pull over, wind down the legs and cook yourself up a
storm.
There are other things that you can do to make your towing
life more pleasurable too. If you're stopping en-route lay-bys are good. Motor
way service stations, generally speaking, are not. I'm not sure what the
caravan fraternity has done to upset the nation's service station designers -
perhaps they're all Jeremy Clarkson fans, but there are few that could be
described as "caravan friendly". The "caravan park" areas
of most such places are laughably small, and spaces are often blocked by idiots
in cars or vans who apparently couldn't find the regular car park and haven't
been moved on.
This seems particularly unfair because you just try parking
your caravan in the wrong section. There'll be a little man in a
fluorescent jacket knocking on your door
in less than a minute. If I sound a little bit chippy on this point it's
because I am - and don't even get me started on the near impossibility of
getting into some of the petrol stations attached to these places with a
caravan on the back. Just take my word for it. There are some good motorway stopping points out there, but they seem to
me to be the exception. As a rule you'll find better places to stop, and easier
to access and less expensive fuel stations if you turn off the motorway and
onto the A and B roads. There you will find a wide abundance of wonderful
things - many of which I will no doubt return to at some point in the future.
The irritations of the service station can be matched on the
road if you let the behaviour of other motorists get to you. The idea that
caravans are a terrible nuisance, causing massive inconvenience to everyone
else on the road has pretty much become an accepted "truth" (thanks,
Top Gear...) which causes the most extraordinary reactions when other road
users see you coming. This is most noticeable at road junctions. I can be
barrelling along at fifty miles an hour, perhaps a hundred yards from the
junction as a car pulls up at the end of the adjoining road.
Under normal circumstances no sane driver would even contemplate pulling out in front of you
when you were only a hundred yards or so away and approaching at such a speed. Common sense, however, doesn't seem to be
something that a certain kind of driver bothers to engage when the vehicle
approaching them is towing a caravan. They don't think "that car is going
pretty fast, I'll wait until it's gone past and pull out behind it, because to
do otherwise would be unsafe". No. They think "that's a caravan, I'd
better get out in front of it, even though I'm then going to drive really
slowly".
So they proceed to pull out in front of you, seriously
testing your reaction times and your brakes, apparently unaware of the fact
that because you're towing your inertia is much greater and so are your
stopping distances. I presume these people are thinking that if they don't get
out in front of the caravan they'll be stuck in one of the mythical traffic jams
that caravans allegedly spawn, I don't know, but I do know that the practice can be fantastically annoying.
There is, however, absolutely no point getting annoyed about
these people. All you can do is hit the brakes as smoothly as you can
(especially if you have somebody else driving three feet from the back of your
'van because they feel they ought to be desperate to get past, even though
you're driving at the speed limit) and continue on your way. After all, it's
the other driver that'll end up with
high blood pressure, not you...
The other thing you can do - and which it seems to me far
too many caravan and trailer towers don't
do - is pull over if you have a queue behind you and let them past. It's not
hard to do - just find one of those handy lay-bays, or indicate left and slow down
when you hit a long straight bit with nothing coming the other way. You'll get
where you're going more or less as quickly as you would have done anyway, and
the people stuck in the queue will get where they're going without
suffering an embolism in frustration. Who knows, they might even mention that
you didn't hold them up when they next get into a "aren't caravan's
awful" conversation in the pub. Of course, they probably won't. The
chances are they'll remember the thirty seconds they were held up, not the fact
that you let them past. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that you'll
arrive at your destination relaxed and with your sanity intact, either ready to
enjoy your holiday or ready to get back to work.
Because, however many trials and tribulations the open road
has to throw at you, travelling with a caravan should be a joy. My little
profile statement at the side of the blog says that I didn't want to buy a
caravan - and I didn't. Before we bought our Lunar Quasar 462 all I thought
about were the potential downsides. Driving with a caravan on the back has
changed the way I look at the world on the other side of the windscreen. It's
slowed me down and allowed me to appreciate the astonishing (in every sense of
the word) beauty of the British countryside. And if that wasn't enough, it's
allowed me to spend time in places I wouldn't otherwise have got to.
Sorry if all of this has seemed uncharacteristically
philosophical - it actually started out as a post about driving up to Scotland.
I just found myself wandering off. Don't worry though, normal service will be
resumed next time with some proper travelogue stuff about the drive north...
*Yet. I suspect this situation will change the next time the
boys in the BBC Top Gear office get really bored. They did, after all, make a
train out of caravans once...
**Or if it's a warm day open up the 'fridge and get yourself
a nice cold can...
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