Sorry. I'm feeling poetic, what can I say?
Anyway. Traditionally we'd be taking the 'van away for a few days at the end of February, but somehow we've ended up with too many things to get done at home, so our lovely 2007 Lunar Quasar 462 remains parked up on the drive of Snail Towers and I've been turning my attention to the equipment we drag around the country with us. Surely some of it is surplus to requirements? Let's start with the front locker and go from there.
OK. We open up the front and what do we have?
Two BP Gaslight bottles. I've always wondered whether we really need two of these. I mean, a full one has been known to last us a full season, so we could save some space and some weight by not carrying them both around. It'd be 5kg off the nose weight for a start! I just wouldn't quite dare though. We go to places where the nearest refil is a couple of hours away, and we have had the "damn, the oven's gone out" experience in the middle of cooking a roast - not being able to nip outside and conntect the other bottle in those circumstances would be a real disaster - they're our hot water, our heating and in the event of battery power they're our fridge too...
And yes, I know we could avoid such a situation by being organised and knowing how much gas is in the bottle. People who know me know that's never going to happen, so two bottles it is, let's move on - what else is in there?
My beloved "briefcase" barbecue. Folds totally flat, more than enough grill space for the two of us, lasted us three years now, stored in a custom case I made out of a section of old windbreak and some gaffer tape. Speaking of which, the current windbreak is also in here, largely because it won't fit anywhere else. We don't use it often, but it comes in handy when we're parked up alongside windswept Scottish lochs.
Also in the front locker, the bottle jack, kept for the nightmare scenario of having to change a wheel at the roadside, the toilet chemicals, the hook-up cable and the TV ariel cable you occasionally need to use at sites with poor reception. We could ditch the TV cable - we use it maybe twice a year - but I know that if I took it out I'd forget to put it back in again. All that's left is the little bag (also made of a piece of old windbreak) that houses all the essential bits and bobs like the wheel nut wrench and the spirit level. So, not all exactly indespensible, but nothing I'd want to do without.
The only other externally accessible storage is the "wet locker". When we're travelling this is where our walking boots live. It's handily situated to be inside the awning, if we had an awning, which we don't. It also houses an external electric socket and a gas point for a gas powered barbecue. Now, if we're talking about non essential items, the gas barbecue hook-up has to be right at the top of the list. It might just be me, but I've never seen the point of a gas barbecue. So far as I'm concerned a barbecue is a thing that burns either wood or carcoal. A gas barbecue is a glorified camping stove, and I really just don't see the point.
Anyway, the wet locker is also where I keep the bird feeder and birdfood.
Don't look at me like that.
Well, OK, I know what you mean. I too used to look at the people who erected bird feeders outside their caravans and think "why?". And then I realised how much time we spent in the 'van watching the local avian life and enjoying comparing the species in different places. So we started putting out a few scraps of this or that to attract them closer to the windows. Turns out the caravan makes an excellent bird hide.
So, one very wet day at the Bunree Caravan Club Site we decided to take the plunge and set out to get a proper bird feeder. Turns out that these are harder to obtain in Fort William (the nearest town) than you'd think, but we eventually found something suitable in the local Argos store and its been with us ever since. As you can see, we've had many little feathered friends take advantage of it, in all sorts of places...
Siskins at Ravenglass
A Bullfinch at Grummore
A Great Tit at Grummore on a glorious sunny day
A very stately Hooded Crow strolling around Dunnet Bay
Blue Tits and a Bullfinch
So yeah, we like the bird feeder. While acknowledging that it makes us look more than a little bit old, but we don't care.
So, that's the outside storage sorted out - what do we keep on the inside?
Obviously there is all the usual crockery, cutlery, food and bedding jiggery-pokery. The radio (permanently tuned to Radio 4) is built in and much used. It has a CD player too, but that's a little tempremental so as a rule we leave that alone. There's usually a selection of books in there, and there's always a copy of the complete works of Jane Austen, a collection of Arthur C. Clarke short stories and a Collins Dictionary to settle any disputes arising from the travel scrabble that also resides in there.
I don't want us to sound too intellectual. We do, these days, also carry a TV.
Now.
When we bought the caravan in 2007 we swore we wouldn't. And we didn't, for quite a while. It was the Olympics that made us do it. We set off for our summer holidays in 2012 the day after the opening ceremony of the London Olympics and intended to watch the games through a laptop using a TV stick. However, the software for the stick crashed almost immediately and we were faced with either buying a TV or not watching the games.
Well, not watching the games wasn't an option - the Olympics has been something of an obsession for me for most of my life (the first games I have any memory of were the Monteal Games in '76 - I was 4, which makes them amongst my very earliest memories) so we decided on taking some drastic action and I headed out to buy a telly.
It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to buy a telly in Stratford-upon-Avon (which is where we were pitched) at half past five on a Saturnday, but I eventually found an ASDA store and bought a little Polaroid flat screen. It's been with us everwhere since, although the lack of signal in alot of the places we visit means it isn't always useful and to be honest if we didn't have it we wouldn't miss it.
The laptop I referred to earlier, however...
Well, for a start, how do you think I write this blog when we're on the road? I can do it on my 'phone, adn have done, but a full size screen is also good to have. Assuming the TV stick works it's also a handy TV backup/replacement, plays DVDs and CDs, and gives us access to things like i-Player and (far more importantly) weather forecasts. Again, we can do these things on the 'phone - which we also always have - but the laptop is just too useful to be without.
So that's us.
What can't you live without on the road?
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