Thankfully this wasn't the case with our inaugural "road test" of Harry's (our Land Rover) Camper conversion. We've just spent our first night camping, heading to a quiet spot in the Yorkshire Dales (known locally simply as "The Dales"), which more or less borders our village. It wasn't a great weekend for enjoying the outdoors (cold, raining, mildly windy), but it WAS a great weekend for "quality control" testing of our camping gear and camping setup. This was the aim of the night away, and the outcome was reasonably good, with some "passes" along with some "fails".
The passes:
- Basic design of the storage-unit/bed-base. Thankfully, as this can't be changed easily! The crates and storage compartments all work pretty well, and there was plenty of space for everything. You do have to think ahead to the things you're going to need, as you often have to move 1 or 2 things to get at something, and then put them back again.
- Soya Chunks. This was Jean's idea to use as a dehydrated food item that can be stored for a long time, is easy to cook and is pretty nutritious. It's amazing how much the texture is like meat when cooked - you can ALMOST trick yourself! Certainly as part of a delicious curry (as we had last night), there are no complaints from my side of the campsite!
- Water container. We fitted a 20L water container at the back of Harry. It has a hose and a tap, and is very convenient for getting water out as and when it's needed
- 3 Piece Cook-ware set. Large pot, small pot and frypan that can collapse into itself, and has good quality non-stick coating.
The Fails:
- The Gas Cooker! Even with light-winds, and the cooker semi-sheltered, water was boiling soo slowly, and the element would often get blown out by a gust of wind. In days past, you might have simply had to put up with this, but now days there are more expensive cookers that have an advanced design to prevent wind causing problems, and use gas more efficiently. Think we'll be biting the bullet and upgrading.
- The "heavy duty" tarpaulin that wasn't so heavy duty. It's hard to know what the quality is of stuff you buy over the internet. Probably 80% of the "things" we buy now are bought online, and most of the time the quality is "as described" or better. Unfortunately, with 2 eyelets ripped out in only 2 hours of travelling, the tarpaulin wasn't one of them!
- Using the camping toilet to store the "toilet waste" when travelling. We opted for a basic camping toilet over a fancy "cassette" type one. I'm happy with the toilet itself, but was hoping to be able to store the waste securely in the toilet's "bucket" while travelling. Suffice to say, without adding any further details, it didn't quite work! It's no major, we'll have a separate secure(!) container for storing the toilet fluid and waste.
So a few extra things to buy, a few tweaks to make, but we're nearly ready for our own "Grand depart" (that's a quick nod to the serious Tour de France fever that is everywhere around us - the Tour is coming right through our village)
Here's a couple of photos of the night!
