Planning had begun back at the beginning of the year for a trip south, a day in London, a weekend at the Volksworld show, and an overnight stop on the way home. Like all best-laid-plans, things started to fall apart (literally) almost straight away.
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| Ready for the off... |
The snow, hail and rain didn't dampen our spirits, but the cancellation of Sunday night's stay at the
St. Neots C&CC site due to flooding meant some frantic last-minute rebooking was in order.
Our first port of call was the
C&CC site at Chertsey. A nice, riverside site with great facilities and a friendly welcome. We were pitched up and in the pub in no time at all - an almost perfect first day...
Almost perfect? You ask. Well, we soon noticed on the way down that we have become a victim of the ever-popular frozen and split windscreen washer pipe.
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| Pitched up, hooked up and perfectly level |
The Chertsey site is ideal for visiting the centre of London. Just a brisk walk across town to the railway station where we purchased a combined rail/underground pass for the day that delivers you into Waterloo in less than an hour. Trains are incredibly regular, compared to up North, and run late into the evening so you can enjoy a full day in London and avoid the evening rush hour.
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| Amazing to think roads were closed with drifting snow back home |
Friday saw us head over to the
Volksworld show. My only gripe with the whole show was being told on the paperwork that camping opened at 3pm - so we milled-around, killing time between leaving the campsite and getting to Sandown. When we arrived at the racecourse at 14:45 (expecting to queue) but we found people had been camped up for ages, bagging all the level spots, great!
I quickly jumped out of the van and found a not-quite-level spot that did look dry and firm under-foot - some campers were already stuck and being towed out.
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| Parked up and aired-out |
By Sunday the temperature had dropped considerably; the windchill on the racecourse was freezing. I guess this kept the show attendance down, everyone was indoors at the show and I felt really sorry for anyone with an outside trade stand or display. I'll go into more detail about the show in a future post.
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| If only I could convey how cold it felt... |
So we come to leave on Sunday lunchtime, a quick adjust of the mirrors and the driver's side (which had been on the exposed side to the weather all weekend) promptly fell off and cracked. A slow steady journey up to the
C&CC site at Milton Keynes (our replacement site) was on the cards. A stiff drink was in order when we arrived. The Accuair eLevel touchpad had also given up on Sunday morning - I was starting to wonder what else could go wrong...
Monday dawned bright and cold, as we're both early risers we headed straight for the
Volkswagen Van Centre in Bletchley near Milton Keynes. At this point we were all prepared for
'none in stock' or
'that'll be X hundred pounds' but we were greeted with a very helpful 'I'll see what we can do'.
A phone call to the
TPS around the corner, a quick trip there to pay, and we're back with replacements for both sides - it seemed to make sense at just £30 each - I never liked the tinted glass that Merseyspeed had fitted; they had no anti-rattle prongs either which might have explained why one fell out!
Back to VW and the helpful girl on reception collared a young lad on his tea-break who followed us out and fitted them for free. We were on our way and very grateful for their help.
Our next stop, having left our traveling companions to make their way home, was back to
iKustoms for a quick spanner-check of the airride install, fit some new top mounts, and hopefully diagnose the eLevel problem. I'll not go into too many details but a quick two-hour stop here turned into a marathon five hour visit with nothing going right. Many thanks must go to Iain at iKustoms for his persistence in sorting problems large and small when us lesser-mortals would have thrown in the towel and slammed the garage door shut!
By 16:30 we were on our way. Everything was working, we had everything crossed. Just the washer pipe to sort at a later date.
