The Journey

So finally we got round to towing the caravan to the house having decided to have it made ready at our own expense and then hope to recover some of the money via the solicitors (a rapidly disappearing hope). In the hurry to get to the ferry at Dover I very nearly killed us by causing the caravan to fish-tail as we passed a slightly slower lorry - how we got out of it I still don't know, nor frankly care to relive the experience to try to work it out.

Thereafter it took three days to complete the journey as I played it extra cautious. And we had a salutary warning when on day 2 we came upon the aftermath of an accident where a caravan had clearly fish-tailed turning itself onto the side and causing the car to crash into the central crash barrier. Fortunately it looked as if the people involved had escaped without personal injury. But it certainly reinforced the message to me that I should be careful.

Thus we were mightily relieved eventually to reach Arné in the afternoon of the third day. But of course nothing is easy and we arrived to discover that the road ouside the house was being resurfaced and access to it therefore was blocked. Oh the frustration! However, I managed to talk with the guy in charge of the team and he arranged it such that we could drive to the house. The downside of this of course was that we would be observed trying to get the caravan onto the courtyard by the whole road-laying crew.

Miraculously I managed to drive simply straight onto the courtyard with no hitch whatsoever, much to my relief. We then went off to purchase essential supplies and returned later, by which time the crew had disappeared. And then we sweated over getting the caravan into the position we wanted it to finally sit in. Said thus it sounds so easy. In fact we spent a good hour going backwards and forwards, slipping and sliding in the mud, hitching up and then unhitching and moving the car around or the caravan manually until, just as we were beginning to despair, it simply went in between the posts of the open-sided barn and into place. If you look at the picture above you'll see how tight the fit actually is.

The next issue was to provide ourselves with water, gas and electricity. In the case of water the problem was that someone had stolen the tap on the pipe from the mains! Unbelievable, as it couldn't be worth anything, but of course I had to replace it to be able to use the mains supply easily. For the gas we needed a French distributor to fit onto the bottles and only when we got this back to the caravan did we find that the caravan has push-fit fittings and the French system is based on screw-in fittings. So more explorations in the hardware supermarkets and we got something that would work. But that wasn't the end of my troubles as I couldn't get the fittings to screw into the gas bottle we'd purchased. So I took the bottle plus fitting back to the garage where I'd bought the gas. And all it was is that in the case of gas bottles the fittings are screwed in counter-clockwise - the man at the garage clearly thought that I was absolutely mad and incompetent; a very perceptive man therefore!

And for electricity we purchased a small generator. This worked first time and has proved very effective; albeit that it is expensive as a way to have power as well as noisy.

But with all of these things in place we could be comfortable and dry, cook for ourselves and begin to get on with the tasks in hand.