In the meantime .......

That me all over......don't think,jump in.1st thing the car isn't big enough to pull the van.The car i had was a merc c180y,best car i ever had,but after only buying it in May it had to go,in favour of a 4x4.

How hard can that be ........very,trawled the Internet,local papers,ad mag etc,couldn't find anything suitable,then by chance i called into Harrats on Saville St. where i came across a Nissan X-Trail,a beast of a car, and went for a test drive ......excellent car.So that was that sorted.

Next we had to sell the van we had at Skeggy.The only option really open to us was to sell back to the site owners because if we sold private we had to give them 15% of the sale value so to save the hassle of finding a buyer in the current economic climate that's what we did.This uncovered more problems,you don't realise how much stuff that has to be removed,it was like moving house and apart from the telly and bedding nothing could really be used in the tourer because of the weight problems.

So we had to set about kitting out the tourer.Again by chance we dropped on a caravan suppliers in Bolsover,owned by a very helpful chap,who after learning of our inexperience gave us loads of help and advise.From there we bought melamine stuff,a porch awning with a bedroom annex,two lightweight chairs (for sitting outside) a table for use in the awning (which we later had to return because at the time we wernt aware that there was one in the new van) but he took it back no prob,chemicals for the toilet,an adaptor for the electric for use when abroad ......the list goes on ,but he did give us a discount so it wernt too bad.

Having never towed anything before I thought I'd better take some instruction......the caravan club do towing classes but as it was by now getting towards the end of Sept these were all full for this year and didn't start again until March.So i found a driving school who did towing lessons, i had a 3 hour lesson that cost £40/hour but it was well worth it.I now couldn't wait for my first go at pulling a caravan myself.......

The selection August 2010

This all started with a view to buying a camper van,after going to a camper van show at Lincoln the previous year.
We have had a static caravan at Skegness for the past 6 years,we being Martine my wife.
Being due a pension payout in Oct 2010 we were definitely having a camper van and so the search began.......

Whilst being on a weekend at the van we decided to start looking after viewing web pages of dealers in the area of Skeggy.We looked at a few in the flesh and basically they were very worn out well used vans in the region of £10000 upwards and we wernt impressed.
Eventually we ended up at Couplands caravans of Louth in Linconshire.They had some very nice campers,classy stuff,but the new ones were out of price range at £42000 plus,a good 2nd hand one was in the region of £26000.Martine had her heart set on a camper and we could just about afford it but it would have taken a big chunk of my payout.

Just out of curiosity i suggested we looked at tourers.....the first one we looked at was a 26ft Fleetwood Heritage 640eb and i was amazed at how much room there was inside,we looked at a few more but went back to the 1st one,then the negatives started to surface about camper vans the main being stuck in a place without any transport other than the van itself,and that would mean packing everything away to go anywhere.
The salesman helped us by telling us of his recent holiday in Switzerland  with his tourer,that was it we we sold on caravaning.He said we could pay a deposit and they would hold it till November,The price on the window was £11300 for a van that was 6 years old,but he said as we had nothing to trade in and were paying cash he would get us a bit of a discount.He came back to us with a figure of £8900 .....where do i sign ?........