Camping short stories, articles and discussion

Well, I’ve got the camper van and I’ve enjoyed driving it around and feeling like a regularly adventurous camping person. I’ve got my gas bottle, tried the cooker out and even the complexities of the portable loo have been overcome, tested and pronounced working perfectly. The leisure battery has been discharged and recharged several times and the electric power supply hookup from my garage at home works perfectly.

But all this is preliminary work. The real test of whether I will truly become a hardened camping person, possibly even a camping enthusiast, is now frighteningly near.

The truth is my camper van was bought so that I could go to lots of folk festivals and stay at their camping facilities. Admittedly, my camper van’s been great to use as a mobile office parked on the sides of various sunny hills while I was working on my laptop, which was brilliant. But, at the end of the day, I was still sleeping in my comfortable king sized bed, warm and safe, at home.

All this will change next weekend when I stay away for my first nights. My comfortable king sized bed will be replaced by a sort of double bed that is slightly under 6 ft long and extends the width of the camper van behind the driver and passenger seat. I can stretch out properly, if I lie diagonally on it and use a bit of the front passenger seat, turned around but it is definitely not the same as a king sized bed.

Then there is a question of heating. Being a rather ancient model of the species, my camper van hasn’t got any! I’m still uncertain whether this matters very much. People tell me, if I have a hot water bottle and lots of duvets, I will be warm enough. They also tell me that if I try sleeping with the unvented gas stove on to heat the camper van, I will probably die from oxygen starvation or gas poisoning or something equally horrible. So maybe, if it gets cold, I’ll just have to shiver!

Whats more, if I survive the night, there will be the question of washing myself. Now I love my power shower every morning. I luxuriate in it. Every nook and cranny is washed at least three times. My shower warms my old body up and gets me going for the day. I don’t know where I’d be without my good morning shower! But I will soon find out because my camper van doesn’t have a shower. It has a small room that contains the portable loo, with a pull down wash basin over it, fed with cold water from a white plastic bottle. Alternatively, there is a sink, intended for washing dishes, by the side of the gas cooker with a tap fed from the built in cold water tank. Washing in the kitchen area at least has the attraction of being able to move arms and legs whilst ‘washing down’ that is hardly any better. The scary thing is that neither option resembles in any way a wonderfully luxuriating stimulating power shower.

But the die is cast and next Friday I will turn up at Dr Bull’s surgery car park at Cheriton Fitzpaine where I have been allocated a camping space for my camper van for the Crediton spring festival folk music weekend.

I let you know how I get on.

Bye for now

Rob

(Rob Hopcott – online author – fiction – news – and nervous camping enthusiast)