Campervanning for Beginners

Excerpts from my diary - the wettest, most miserable holiday in the history of campervanning.

Campervanning for Beginners

Background to the diary.

23^rd August to 3^rd September 2024

Remember the famous quote from the film, Withnail and I, when they stand there, drenched, in the p*ssing rain and say to the farmer, “we’ve come on holiday by mistake”. Well, just keep that in mind as you read on.

It started with my bright idea of hiring a camper van to get to Cornwall. After years of braving the endless and torturous drive to St Ives to visit my cousin, I decided that this would be much easier. Stopping enroute to enjoy other places in Cornwall was going to be a bonus and I was looking forward to the change from our usual beach or city breaks. Paddy, my husband, was less enthusiastic, comparing it to “being trapped in a container lorry like a refugee.” So I was keen to win him over. Paddy likes his basic comfort and, in his words, “I do shit stuff all year, why do I want to go away and do more shit stuff.” Clearly Paddy wanted other people to do the shit stuff. If that’s you, you might want to book that beach holiday in Barbados about now.

The cost of this holiday, once you hire the van, pay for campsites, petrol, dog accessories and purchase enough camping equipment to fill an aircraft hangar, is up there with the cost of the European Grand Tour, so beloved of the Victorian aristocracy. I’d also suggest that you forget the trippy hippy image of the free-spirited wanderer, living an eco-friendly life on the open road; dog in the front, a tenner in his pocket and nothing but some lentils in the back. If ever it was a thing, it isn’t now. Not on UK campsites with plug in electric pitches and campsite toilets it isn’t, anyway. Although it is possible to have TVs in campervans, we didn’t, and I have no idea of the witchery involved in getting one to work but I figured we would be outside, enjoying the sea air so it wouldn’t matter. We travelled with our huge Labrador, Lord Walter Waggington, who made it clear that he wasn’t impressed with the sleeping arrangements, or the biscuity food that he was forced to eat instead of his usual meat. He took up a good chunk of floor space where the table should have been, so it was tight. So I set off with two underwhelmed males reluctantly accompanying me, on what was, yes, my idea of a fun trip. I really will have to stop having ideas. Anyway, here we go.

Day 1

It didn’t start well, with storm Lillian raging through the night, but we dodged the worst of it. But then came 6.5 hours stuck on the M1 in streams of heaving traffic, crawling their way past the chain of not-so-smart motorway pull-ins that are currently being built. We finally arrived at the campsite, the racecourse in Stratford-Upon -Avon, and spent an hour learning how to do camper van stuff. Not easy when you are still till delirious from the drive and have a body that needs to be jacked upright from the sitting position. We got the thing ‘plugged in’ before proceeding to copy ‘proper’ camper van people by putting our chairs outside to have a cup of tea, even though it would have worked equally well drinking tea inside the van where it was much warmer. We sat for an hour looking at the grass and shivering under the drizzle before packing up the chairs and looking at the grass again, only through the window. It hadn’t changed.

Later on that evening, when we couldn’t see the grass anymore, we ventured into the town where we found a very nice pub called the Dirty Duck. It had good beer and lots of thespians from the nearby Shakespeare company kept bursting into song so it was quite a merry place. Paddy looked happy. Maybe it’s because we are 3 miles away from the campervan.

Day 2

We woke up to rain. Lots of it. I considered telling Paddy that it was the fairies tip-tapping on the van roof spreading their happy dust, but it was too much of stretch, even for him.

The sleeping experience was interesting. We had to climb a ladder into the bed area then try and get comfortable in a space the size of my knicker drawer at home. It occurred to me that most of van life would be a whole lot easier if you were, say, a contortionist or an Olympic gymnast or just not fat. Once settled it was quite comfy for me, but Paddy said that sleeping with his face shoved up against fabric walls felt like getting stuck down the back of an upholstered sofa. Even so, he was soon snoring, but I lay awake thinking about my childhood hamster, who did in fact, get stuck down the back of an upholstered sofa. Poor thing, although he didn’t have to listen to anyone snoring. Note - campervanning is not for people who live with snorers. Not unless you have devices that muffle it, like pillows. I’ll leave that there.

So back to the rain. The next day it was bouncing down. Having got soaked going to the showers I managed to drench everything in the van that I touched, a bit like that princess from Frozen, only with rain instead of ice. It was time to get van envy. Our neighbour’s van is huge gold thing the size of an articulated lorry, but with bay windows (not joking) and a rooftop helipad (well maybe not, but that’s what it looks like). (See photo 1= their van 2= our van). We stared at it, longingly, through our dripping windows, imagining the occupants sat around a 6-seater oak dining table, enjoying eggs Benedict and filter coffee off the family silver. Meanwhile we sat sipping lukewarm tea and airing our wet socks in the shower tray. Small is beautiful, I reminded myself and made another cuppa, cos I’m getting quite good at that now. In fact it’s my best campervanning skill so far. Apparently, the rain will stop at 1pm on the dot. My weather app is never wrong. So now I’m going to attempt to make some food while we sit it out and if we survive that, we will pop into Stratford to see some Shakespearey things. Happy camping!

later that day….

It didn’t stop, but we ventured in anyway and I got rained into Shakespeare’s kitchen for about an hour with a guided group of Chinese tourists and a woman from Barnsley. The woman said that she didn’t know why she had come to Stratford, or to Shakespeare’s house, because she preferred the East Coast and Danielle Steele. It has plenty of things to do when it rains apparently. She looked like she was going to cry. I knew where she was coming from. It occurred to me that I had paid a small fortune for a holiday that required endless sun, during the wettest summer since records began. Would this turn into a Shakespearean tragedy?

Day 3

We tried out a new sleeping arrangement last night. Paddy got on the bed in the pop-up roof. It looked too much like having an MRI scan to me, but Paddy assured me that he was comfortable once he got used to the constant rocking in the wind and the accompanying seasickness. He’s currently reading ‘An Evil Cradling’; a harrowing account of Brian Keenan’s real-life experience in Beirut, where he was kidnapped and kept chained to a radiator for years, amongst other horrors. According to Paddy this is the book of choice for the reluctant campervanner as it provides a range of examples of hardship, suffering and indignities with which to compare the campervanning experience. Unsurprisingly, in this human endurance competition, Brian usually wins. The effect on Paddy, however, is that he can now shift his perspective to one of humble acceptance and gratitude. He has found it to be very handy indeed, especially when cleaning out the toilet cassette or having to walk 3 miles to have a poo.

The good news was that it was a lovely sunny morning in Stratford which allowed us a peak into the world of real campervanning, you know, the type where you get to sit outside. It didn’t last long. We had barely unfolded the chairs before the rain started to come down again, so we gave up set off on the next leg of our trip, to North Devon.

A couple of hours later, we arrived at a place that I keep pronouncing with a Welsh accent for no rational reason whatsoever. Clovelly. Just try and say it without sounding like Rob Brydon, go on, I dare you.

So, the question is, what do you do in a camper van when it’s howling a gale and you are 40 mins from the actual village of Clovelly, which also happens to be at the bottom of a very large cliff? I will tell you. You open a bottle of wine and a good book, and you listen to nature doing its worst. According to the trusty weather app it will be sunnyish tomorrow so we will go and explore. For now, however, I’m going to drink enough wine that I can’t tell anymore if it’s me rocking or the camper van. And I will amuse myself by placing bets with Paddy on how long it takes before our neighbour’s 4-man tent blows over the nearby hedge. I give it an hour.

Day 4

Things are looking up. It’s stopped raining and Paddy’s mood has lightened now that we have discovered that he hasn’t got flu/covid/a chest infection. The source of his ills is, in fact, some lavender body lotion that I accidentally packed and he’s allergic to lavender. Whoops! If he thought this camping trip was an attempt to kill him and claim on the insurance before, then now, he’s convinced. Oh well, it will keep him on his toes.

We went to investigate Clovelly village and the beach. It was super-pretty but rammed with tourists and wasps. We squeezed onto a cold, low wall and sat and had a pint down near the sea. I got stung by a wasp as I leaned into Paddy for a selfie. It was squashed between our arms. Of course, this meant that the entire Clovelly wasp population had a field day and followed me around like Madonna’s entourage for the rest of the day.

So, at the 1/3rd stage of the holiday here are some things I have learned so far about campervanning.

1. People who otherwise wouldn’t answer their front door in their pyjamas have no qualms whatsoever about wandering around a campsite in various states of undress. Don’t think ‘Baywatch’, if you know what I mean.

2. Unlike me, it appears that most women who go camping do not take enough beauty products to set up their own counter in John Lewis. They wander about with, at most, a slick of mascara and some factor 50 on, whilst I parade around like something off ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’.

3. People are very chatty. Paddy thinks this is a survival technique and described it as follows: 1)Find your people 2) befriend them even if they are twats 3) quickly build community bonds, then if any of their campervanning/camping survival skills fail, you have plenty of people to annoy, ask for help. Paddy thinks this is a primal necessity considering that to him, campervanning is up there with that episode of Survival with Bear Grylls, when he sheltered himself inside the stomach of a dead camel.

4. If you want to manoeuvre your way around a camper van without banging your head, knocking your teeth out or getting your sleeves caught in everything you must move slowly and stealthily. Think of a burglar when the occupants are asleep upstairs, or French mime artist, that way you will remain injury free and have less to clean up. Unfortunately, me and Pads are about as graceful as a pair of hippos in stilettos.

5. Everything I said in point 4 is magnified x 10 after a bottle of wine or two.

Day 5

We left Clovelly this morning and stopped off in Bude. My hopes were up as it was sort of sunny and not freezing. We stopped at a lovely cafe next to the canal for breakfast and listened to music from a jazz band across the road. People in various surreal floating things peddled past us. It was all very ‘Insta’. ‘This is what it’s all about’ I thought, excited that Paddy’s camper-conversion therapy had gone up a notch.

And then it started raining again. We found ourselves on a cliff top bench overlooking the beach, covered from head to foot in black rainwear like a pair of waterproof nuns. We watched the surfers and had a lengthy discussion about whether wee could come out of any opening in a wetsuit, or if it just sat there, waiting to explode into a piss fountain and drench unsuspecting sunbathers. Maybe wetsuit wearers can enlighten us?

When we got fed up of that, we set off to Wadebridge, our next stop on the way to St Ives. We landed at the campsite and yep, you guessed, it is still p*ssing it down. It was all getting a bit depressing. BUT, I have been watching those Facebook reels about positivity and how one should focus on all the good things by pretending nothing crap ever happens. So here are 5 positive vibes to focus on:

1. I got stung by a wasp BUT I didn’t die.

2. Another wasp then decided to kill itself in my beer so I had to throw it away BUT alcohol is very bad for you and I am pleased that this wasp made me see the error of my ways. Well, until we went to the bar and got another that is.

3. I drove the wrong way down a very narrow track, so I had to reverse the beast all the way back up, BUT I didn’t damage the van or the vehicles belonging to the angry gentleman behind me or the sour faced gentleman in front of me. Paddy said that I should ‘own’ my mistake and not keep referring to them as ‘a miserable pair of twats’, and while I agree in principle, it still made me feel better to say it out loud.

4. The weather has been crap, BUT we are heading south and, as Paddy (in a rare moment of optimism) pointed out it gets hotter the further south you go, especially if you keep going to sub–Saharan Africa.

5. I don’t have a 5.

We are going for a walk now, in the rain, but it’s all good because I have another bottle of wine in the fridge for when I get back. Ooo there’s another positive! If I keep going like this, I’ll be so positive about everything that I will end up like a slightly deranged Life Coach. Or I could just end up needing rehab.

Day 6

We were shocked to the core this morning when we woke up to rain. Oh, come on, of course we weren’t. We had planned to go cycling on the Camel Trail with my cousin Ali and her husband, Dave, who live in St Ives but who were driving up to meet us. Walter was going in a trailer with Paddy pulling him along. Walter has never been in a trailer and Paddy’s never pulled one. To quote Paddy: “I’m going to look like f**king Ben Hur in a nylon chariot.” I assured him he wouldn’t, but y’know, I just can’t get that image out of my head now. Walter is so bloody neurotic that we weren’t sure we would even get him in it, but in the end they both got going with the aid of a few treats and a kickup the arse.

So off we went on our hire-bikes to Padstow. It’s a beautiful, scenic ride but ‘baboon’s arse’ started kicking in after the first 2 miles. Can I point out that most men my age are so embarrassed by ‘women’s issues’ that I could fuck off to Spain for a fortnight and on my return, when asked where I had been, could say “for some tampons” and that would be the end of the questioning. So, imagine how thankful I was to have Paddy on hand to mansplain to me how cycling can affect vaginas and advise me how to cycle in such a way as to relieve pressure on said area. As all us ladies know, there is nothing that men don’t know about vaginas, so I was pleased that he was on hand to provide such sound advice., just before I pushed him off his bike.

Padstow was heaving with families, but still very pretty. We eventually managed to screw up those lost cycling calories with beer, ice cream and fish n chips. Not Rick Stein’s fish and chips, as promised, due to the length of the queue. It was so long that the visitors obviously thought Rick himself would be peeling the spuds and battering the haddock. We went instead to a fish n chips café further into the town. It was so rammed that Ali and I stood in the food line for ten minutes until we realised we were actually in the toilet queue.

After lunch we meandered around the harbour. Ali started to get very excitable and started whispering “Bev, Bev” in my ear. As I’m deaf as a post I just kept repeating “Bev, Bev” back at her, like I was trying to learn English. Eventually she pointed and shouted “BEZ, it’s BEZ”. And sure enough, there the old bugger was. Wandering around Padstow in oversized shorts with a couple of dogs. I was tempted to go over and tell him how impressed I had been at a recent Happy Mondays gig, to find that he could still do his ‘Bez dance’ through the entire set, but settled for a sneaky photo.

And now for the best bit. We set off back and… wait for it…the bloody sun came out. Yes, the actual real sun. Padstow looked even more beautiful in the sun and I’m sure Bez did too. So, all in all it was a very good day. Now we just need this sun to keep shining and I’m sure Paddy will be totally in love with campervanning by next week.

Day 7

It didn’t start well. We had decided on a beach day as the extremely accurate weather app said it was going to be sunny. I packed the beach bag with factor 50 and towels, got the beach tent and the windbreaker ready… and then the rain came down in buckets.

We could have gone somewhere else of course, but I was 100% determined to have a beach day, even if it was in the p*ssing rain. So off we went to Harlyn beach and got a great parking spot near the beach and a wonderful beach cafe. Then, would you believe it, the bloody sun came out!! At last!! So, we had a great day at the beach and Walter had lots of ball games and played in the sea and Paddy enjoyed himself, so for now, all is good.

Day 8

After a long day at the beach yesterday we got up this morning to a special kind of chaos that can only to be found in a camper van. I surveyed the devastation. Yep, I had totally lost control of my domain. I had no idea where anything was, the floor was full of sand and socks, the laundry was piling up and my hand towel looked like I’d dried a muddy dog with it. Actually, I had probably dried a muddy dog with it. In the middle of all this Paddy managed to perform his daily spilling trick, where he manages to knock over something containing fluid just by looking at it. Then we both banged our heads on some cupboards, and I trapped my hand in a drawer. We were moving on to St Ives, so I attempted to organise the inside and sent paddy to do ‘outside’ things. Paddy will only do the outside things because he is such a clumsy lummox that when he is inside the van he just sits there, motionless, clinging to the arms of the swivel seat with a facial expression that’s not unlike that of Father Dougal at his most perturbed. See attached photo.

So, with a tidy van we set off to St Ives, taking the sunshine with us (happy face 👉 😁). We arrived at the posh (expensive) campsite and found our pitch. It was overlooking the sea and was just beautiful. I decided I had better put some washing in while we could still get in the van at the same time as the laundry bag, and Paddy decided to sunbathe with Walter. Tonight, we are off to the beach for sunset watching and beers with Ali and Dave so we are looking forward to that. In the meantime, we are enjoying the sun. At last!

Days 9-11

The last 4 days went by in a blur. Apart from a lovely few hours on the beach at some point, it continued to rain but thankfully we had Ali and Dave to cheer us up. The weather did nothing to help me convert Paddy to the world of campervanning which he described at various points as:

1. An experience besieged with a thousand indignities

2. Like playing a never ending, injurious, game of extreme Twister.

3. Making everyday things, like getting dressed, feel like wrestling a bear in a phone box

4. Noisy when it rained (which was all the time so, well, all the time then).

And more specifically, campervanning with me as:

1. Like putting two wasps in a jar and shaking it up.

2. Like being trapped in a submarine with Hitler.

3. Delusional, on my part - summary of Paddy’s general rant: “if you thought for one minute that all our ‘driving arguments’ and ‘who-does-what bickers’ and ‘snoring rants’ would suddenly disappear in some hallucinogenic haze, as we lived out your fanciful Enid Blyton style version of our trip, entitled, ‘The Famous Two go on a Campervanning Adventure and Love it and Never Argue,’ then you are a complete fantasist and I would like a divorce.” Ok, so he’s got a point.

To round the trip off nicely our drive home was beset with road works, diversions and accidents, in addition to a thousand wee stops for the dog or me. We set off at 11am and arrived home at midnight. Yep, that’s 13 hours. Note - we live in Yorkshire, not the North Pole.

Even after a good night’s sleep Paddy claims his most enduring memory is not the lovely day on the beach, or the picturesque surroundings on the Camel trail, but being sat in the men’s toilets on a campsite, listening to one man blow his nose and another farting away in the next cubicle, while ‘camp radio’ played ‘Never Give up on a Good Thing’ by George Benson through the toilet speakers. I’m not sure camping was really for him.

But believe it or not there were positives, he said. Yes. Really!

1. He believes he has lost weight, even if it is due to being in a stressed state for 14 days and “eating the equivalent of post-war rations”.

2. Cleaning the toilet cassette wasn’t the ‘toilet scene from Trainspotting’ (you know the one) that he thought it would be. You see, while pooing on the van loo would have been marginally better than stuffing a handful of cat litter down my knickers and going about my day, the best choice we made was to stay on campsites with toilets. I think this helped him come to terms with the daily chore of emptying it.

3. He like some of the pubs and he liked Cornwall and he liked seeing Ali and Dave. All of which he likes regardless of whether he is in a campervan, so I’m not sure that counts.

But all that said we did have a lot of laughs, which I’m sure will come back to him as his brain processes the trauma and, as ever, it was great to see my family. As for me, I loved campervanning. I’m sure it’s easier in your own customised one and doing it in sunshine rather than torrential rain, but I think it will always be a ‘marmite’ activity for most people. Best advice for beginners: Start with a weekend trip!

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Author’s note - My tales are based on true events. They are lifted from years of journals and written from my POV for the entertainment of the reader. Where consent is absent, names, places and details have been changed to protect anonymity.