Camping Taxonomy

Jim's comments on the last post got me thinking. As I have said before, people who go camping, whether in caravans, motorhomes or tents, are generally nice people. A busy campsite in summer is a friendlier place than any hotel or guesthouse that I have ever seen. People are willing to chat with perfect strangers, will help each other out, and generally tolerate each other in a way that seems to have vanished from urban life. As far as I am concerned, camping (however you do it) is a Good Thing.

I have camped (in the tent sense) all my life, and succumbed to the luxuries - remember all things are relative - of a caravan only in the last ten years. Over that time, I have noticed a few correlations between the type of person you meet and the mode of camping they choose. Here are a few observers' notes for your perusal:

1. Small Tent



This is usually the accommodation of choice of the student, backpacker or bike camper. To be honest, you can't get anything much bigger than this on a bike unless you go down the GoldWing and trailer route, and we don't want to go there, children, do we? People whose priorities are being there as cheaply as possible rather than showing how wealthy they are, and therefore usually good company. This is the roof over my head when I am away on the bike. GFGN sociability score: 8.

2. Large Tent



Families with kids, or older couple who like the tent thing but appreciate the space. Almost always good to know, as they rarely have pretensions or a competitive streak. Some of the nicest people I have met camping have had something like this. On the site in Brittany there was something like this, occupied by a young Belgian couple with two children under 3. The amazing thing was that they had arrived in a sidecar outfit, pulled by a fully-customised Yamaha FJR1300 with Earles forks and tyres that would not have looked out of place on a Lotus Elise. Here's a photo of them leaving the site, just for the record - amazing bit of kit:



GFGN sociability score: 9

3. Small Caravan



There's a paradox here. Logically, in the light of the general correlation between caravan size and dickheadedness, these owners should be among the angels. But, as I said in the previous post, these things aren't linear and in fact I have never met someone with a really tiny caravan who wasn't a bit weird. I think it's the conscious anti-consumerist attitude (we have a caravan, but it isn't a caravan, you know) that marks them out. We have one staying in a field near us at the moment. It's so tiny they must take it in turns to breathe. You don't get into it, you put it on. I had a quick look while I was cutting the grass there the other day and their car was absent, and not only did they have the fish-symbol and huge stickers with scary quotations from the Bible on the back (and the only book in evidence on a quick glance through the windows was a huge leather-bound, gilt-edged volume with lots of place-markers between the pages, presumably left from morning prayers), but in the back of that caravan was a cage and a parrot. I moved away, fully expecting the parrot to see me and start squawking "Lest Ye Repent ..." Those owners of these bijou residences that I have met have usually been rather arrogantly dismissive of the plebs around them - "Don and I don't really see the need for electricity, do we Don?" - so I try to avoid them at all costs. GFGN sociability score: 2-6, depending on level of weirdness.

4. Large Caravan




I think Jim says all that needs to be said here in his comments to the previous post. Twin-axle, size of a double-decker bus, automatic this and hydraulic that, satellite dishes, barbecues the size of a commercial kitchen range, illuminated cocktail cabinets, all there for one of two purposes: to say "I have more money than you", or "I like camping but I want the experience to be as close to living at home as possible". Now the first we can dismiss as plain dickwittery, but the second needs some unpacking. Seeking comfort and convenience is natural; it's what got us out of the trees and onto inventing stuff like the steam engine and the pop-up toaster. But there comes a point, in my view, where the search for ultimate comfort starts to negate the whole experience. If you can rock up at a campsite, plug into mains electricity and mains water, and have all the conveniences of home, exactly what are you achieving, apart from a different view from your living-room window? (And who goes on holiday to watch telly anyway?) I suppose we all slice this one a different way, but for me there has to be some inconvenience, some reminder that you are not living in 39, Acacia Avenue, or the experience has gone. Take water, for example. The latest "Super Pitches" have a constant mains water supply, and the latest caravans have an inlet so that, once you are plugged in, you have the same access to water as you do from the tap at home. Where's the fun in that, unless you are so elderly and infirm that you can't carry a bucket of water? Water that you have walked to a standpipe for, and carried back (even if it in one of those roll-along things to save your crumbling spine) is water that you appreciate. When you have carried it, you conserve it. It may only be a reversed millimetre down the thousand-mile road Back To Nature, but it's something. It seems to me that some of these huge caravans reach the point where you are not camping at all (but I guess the tent campers say that about any caravan - I know I did - so each to his own). In terms of personality, I have found a simple formula: the bigger the caravan, the bigger the twat who owns it. Owners often like to engage you in deep discussion about the merits of their satellite-finding laser-driven remote-control gadgetry, and frequently with the purpose of pointing out the inadequacies of your own arrangements. GFGN sociability score: 3.

5. Small Motorhome



Chinky, dinky and massively claustrophobic, these are almost always owned by retired couples who use them to avoid taking the grandchildren away. GFGN sociability score: 2.

6. Medium Motorhome



If I had a motorhome (or campervan, or camper, or RV, or whatever you like to call it), I think this would be the one. Large enough to live in, but small enough not to dominate the landscape for several hectares, and generally owned by people who are just - well - going on holiday. There's no statement here, no one-upmanship, no my-paella-pan-cum-griddle-cum-barbecue is bigger than yours. They go fairly well on the roads, so rarely hold people up, but they are big enough for a couple to live in for a week without going mad with cabin fever. Most owners I have met have been pretty nice people, neither censoriously low-footprint nor arrogantly materialistic. Often seen with bicycles on the back, which is generally a good sign. GFGN sociability score: 8.

7. Large Motorhome



We're getting back into the Large Caravan area here, with the additional factor of boasting about torque, turbo-lag and the benefits of automatic transmission and cruise control on the really long journeys, dear. These almost never have bikes attached - there will be a huge rack at the rear which makes the Forth Bridge look flimsy and insubstantial, and it will carry a matching pair of his'n'hers scooters. After all, what's the point of getting away from it all if you then have to pedal up hills? I long to see one with a pair of really funky lightweight trailbikes, like the Yamaha Serow, or something a bit radical like a Velosolex, but no: it's always those little 50cc scooters with matching helmets. GFGN sociability score: 2.

8. Very Large Motorhome



No, really, they exist. You never see these on European campsites, as they simply wouldn't fit down the roads to get there. God knows how you justify taking one of these on the road, unless you have twenty children and they all need access to the built-in football pitch for mid-season training. I have seen some that come close, however (I was pitched next to one for a few days in France) and I can say with all sincerity that the owners were unpleasant, acquisitive morons with no sense of self-awareness or irony, who believed that the rest of the world exists just to get out of their way. These are the ones that often tow cars behind them - usually a Smart Car or a micro-mini, but I have seen Mondeo-sized cars being pulled along, and this year a Mazda MX5. I sometimes wonder why they don't get their house put on a huge flat-bed and tow that too. They wouldn't miss anything then. GFGN sociability score: 0 to get-me-out-of-here.

One final point: all of the above applies only to Brits. Forrin people, and specifically the French, Belgians, Dutch and Germans, seem to be able to go camping in a sensible and calm way, without feeling that they need to demonstrate all sorts of irrelevant aspects of their lives and insecurities. If you get to a multinational campsite and have the choice, avoid the places where the Brits congregate (you will be able to tell this by the 20m-high masts carrying the Cross of St George and the drunken noises after 11 pm), and none of the above will matter. Head for the Dutch enclave if you can - always nice people and generally great company.

I have just seen this, and it might be the way to go ...

Caravans - warning, contains strong language

Don't get me started ...

I've often thought about doing a blogpost on caravans, but then I reckoned that no-one would want to read five pages of foul language followed by a single shot and silence.

So here's just an observation.

I had to do a couple of repairs on the van before we give it a clean and put it to bed until the next time. Both things were the result of such shitty build quality that I am barely able to contain my contempt for whichever 'engineer' thought they would be a good idea in the real world.

The first was the so-called wardrobe rail. This is a metal rail about 18" long inside a tall cupboard, on which it is supposed that you hang your clothes. When we got home, and bearing in mind a couple of rough roads between S Brittany and home, all the clothes were in a heap on the floor. The rail had fallen off. People with carpentry experience look away now, but let me tell you how this rail was attached to the caravan. Each end was in a plastic socket, which was screwed to a batten of MDF, which was in turn glued (a stripe of glue about 2mm wide) to the interior walls of the cupboard - which were composed of 2mm ply. The glue was reinforced with four pins which were thinner than a human hair. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. It is now attached with a full-width application of all-purpose adhesive, backed up with four steel bolts with penny washers to spread the load on the ply. And I did the same for the other end, which hasn't failed - yet. You could hang a grand piano off it. Cost - under two quid. Time - about 30 minutes. Aggravation because Swift couldn't be arsed to do a proper job when they built it - massive.

The second was even worse. There is a bracket which carries the outlets to the sink and shower water drains on the side of the caravan. The little plastic covers that blank off the outlets fell off within a year of new, but it seemed OK without them. In France, I plugged in a waste pipe to the outlet and the whole thing came off in my hand. It dangled for the rest of the holiday and all the way home. This bracket was attached to the underneath of the caravan at the side - the equivalent position on a car would be under the sill, immediately behind the front wheel. A position which takes quite a lot of water if you travel in the rain. How were the brackets attached to the caravan body? They were screwed into a piece of softwood, which was then glued to the flimsy side-skirt of the caravan. The wood had simply rotted and left the pipes and outlets to blow around in the breeze. How anyone with experience could imagine that such an arrangement could last more than a few months in British weather is beyond me. I replaced the rotten softwood with treated timber that won't rot for 25 years, and attached it to the caravan body with bolts that won't give way in the wash of the first artic to pass on the opposite carriageway.

I haven't mentioned the towel rail that fell off because someone hung a towel from it, or the fridge door that broke off in someone's hand, or the catches that simply break in normal use, or the retractable blinds that don't retract, and when they are 'professionally' repaired last for half a day before failing again. Or the bed support that broke on the first day of a holiday when someone put their weight on it (that's what beds are for, right?) and was repaired with a proper piece of wood and has lasted seven years without a problem since. Or the weather seals on the lockers that come adrift and cost pounds to replace - and then last six months before coming loose again ("it's a common problem, Sir, there's nothing we can do but replace them and hope for the best"). Or the sealing strips round the windows that apparently don't like sunlight and pull away from the frame and need replacing at God-knows-what a metre plus labour. Or the locker lights that have never worked, but it doesn't matter because from the way they are sited thay don't light the locker anyway. Or the gas heater that failed and needed expensive refurbishment despite never being used. Or the pan drawer in the cooker that always opens while on the move and distributes pans around the floor of the caravan because it's only held shut by a cheap fucking magnet.

I could go on, and I probably will, but not here.

All in all, the caravan reminds me of a line in a James Bond novel (sorry, no idea which one; my internal Bond concordance has failed me), where he describes a motel room as "not a place to get seriously drunk in". The caravan is like that: very nice and tasteful, but if you got drunk in there you would end up sitting in a pile of matchwood with your accommodation open to the skies. I know caravans need to be light, but must the construction be so crappy? The internal joinery of ours makes MFI look like Sheraton. All veneer and surface and 'customer appeal', but lacking the qualities I need to see, like robustness, durability and hose-down ease of maintenance.

I'll fess up here: I like our caravan. It's our home when we are away, it's very modest compared to most, and the bed is large and superbly comfortable. I love camping, and with a caravan you get most of the benefits of 'proper' camping (the fresh air, the ability to do as you please*, and the fact that people who camp are generally nice, friendly and relaxed) with none of the drawbacks or limitations (the bad back from constantly bending and sleeping on a lump, the burnt food from primitive cooking arrangements, the nightmare of putting away a large wet tent on your last morning). I like our caravan; I don't like caravans - the way they clog up the roads, the way people seem to want to turn them into replicas of home with table lamps and potted plants and doilies on the table and satellite dishes and the sheer naffness of some of the names, like 'Senator' and 'Monarch' and 'Aventura' and 'Elite' and 'Connoisseur' and 'Navigator' and - Oh God - 'Rallye' and 'Impression'. Do these people have no sense of irony? "Hey, I might be a balding retired accountant with piles and no sense of humour, but you can tell I am really a hardened world adventurer like Ewan and Charlie because my caravan is called a 'Trekker'.

But our caravan is medium-small, a little battered now, and modest, and I like it that way. In fact, the more knocks it gets, the more I like it. I'll even forgive it the utterly shite joinery, at a pinch. Anna absolutely loves it (I think it's that nest-building thing that women have) and, although I doubt if I would buy another when this one dies of old age, I'm happy with it.

I still feel like a chump when I am towing it, mind you. That's why I have a huge "Think Bike: Think Biker" sticker on the back.



* Many's the time I have sat outside the caravan with a beer and watched the sun go down, and thought "if I was staying in a hotel, I would be in a bar and paying bar prices for all of this". And you try popping out of your room into a corridor for midnight pee in a hotel - they don't like it.