On our continuing jaunt north, further secrets of the campervan become revealed, such as the little role away screen for the top bunk that stops the sun from streaming in from the sky light. A piece of information that would have been useful to know for the last 6 nights.

As we go, we are doing small improvements to the camper, Some voluntary, some not so:

·         We started to waterproof the corners and exposed wooden areas of the toilet/shower.

       

Replaced one dodgy fluro light with an LED.

·         Changed a tyre when the tread came off when we were on the highway. Luckily, the tyre was still inflated so we were able to limp into the petrol station 400m down the road. 2 new tyres are on the cards.

·         When the tyre blew, it also caught wiring under the van and ripped it off. We checked the lights, brakes and indicators and they all work, so we have no idea what it was for…….

·         Driving through the narrow street of Nottingham to find a park to visit the Information Centre created a situation where I accidentally hit a side mirror of a parked van which then smashed their small triangular passenger side window. I was able to ring the business and they were quite good about it. They were on the same street and they gave us a coffee, took down our details and the lady told us her life story. Lesson learnt! Don’t go driving into a big city looking for car parks for a camper. There aren’t any. We also lost a small strip of siding on the camper but it just adds character.

·         We decided that the van needed a tune up and service. That went very well and the camper drives much better and has improved the fuel efficiency by almost 150% (it was awful before). The mechanic also pointed out that the previous owners had attached coil springs to the old leaf springs to raise the arse up higher in very dodgy way. Possibly because to replace the old leaf springs would cost about 350 pounds. We are doing that on Tuesday.

·         The speaker and stereo work well but if you turn them up high enough to hear it over the running of the engine, you get the speakers vibrating making it hard to hear the music. Buggered how we’re going to fix that one without replacing them.

·         The fridge, stove and burners work well on gas but I’m not sure how efficient the fridge is on electricity, if at all.

·         The table and bench seat are good but we’ll have to re-glue some of the joins as they seem to be coming apart. Not in a critical way but a bit of TLC is needed if we are using them for the next 130 days.

·         The toilet was working great until yesterday, now the blue water isn’t running when you press the button to flush. It’s electrical, so we may have to get that seen to by an professional camper person if we can’t figure it out ourselves.

·         And the grey water tank seems to have a leak which we will patch up soon. It saves us emptying the tank but people may get a bit stroppy.

This may seem to be a bit of whinge but it’s more of a list of things to work on over time. We knew it wouldn’t be perfect when we bought it, so some of the points aren’t unexpected.

Sherwood Forest is heavily conserved now and touristy. Apart from the fact that they don’t know if there was a Robin Hood, they are basing the entire selling point on ‘you have to decide for yourself’. The main attraction is the ‘Major Oak’, an oak tree about 1000 years old that the trustees don’t want to die. It was a bit like seeing a 100 year old person on life support but not being in anything more than a vegetative state because the kids don’t want him to die. I did walk around Sherwood forest in medieval clothes which was fun.
J

We stayed in a town near Halifax on Saturday night. It was a great little village where most of the people are probably related. The scenery was beautiful.

Sunday night has us at ‘The Crooked Billet’ a little pub/restaurant near Towton. A massive battle occurred here during the War of the Roses reporting to have cost the lives of up to 28,000 men. I’ll be taking a walk around the battle site tomorrow.

We were going to visit the Eureka! Children’s Museum but we realised it was more an educational playground for 6 year olds so we decided to visit ShibdenHall which was fabulous.

The next 2 days have us at York to visit the Train Museum and the Jorvik Viking Centre.

We then have 3 days to get to Dundee in Scotland!
J