Sometimes its all a bit too easy for me to get sidetracked into trying to perfect my vision for how I want the camper to end up being, but this can be at the expense of simply using it as is and just enjoying it! Well not today, today the bus is packed, the sun is shining and the plan is to hit the road and head north to Scotland!
The Canterbury Pitt cooker unit is not yet finished, but for once, this will not be an excuse for not going! This time we’re taking my trusted 30-year-old Trangia cooker for roadside hot drinks and food. Although we would need to do a slight detour to Morden in South London to collect a missing part that I managed to source on eBay!
As it was a very much spur of the minute road trip, we were planning to make things up as we went along. Some clothes, sleeping bags and various bits were chucked in the back, if we missed anything, we would pick it up on the go. We were planning to use various Britstop locations for our nightly stop overs, and work our route out on the fly to take in various locations as we headed north to Scotland…
In that spirit of making things up as we went along, Lorna remembered a charity she wanted to visit which was nearish to our general route so we then went to visit WorkAid. They are set up to tackle poverty by providing disadvantaged people with the tools they need to learn a skilled trade and earn a living. Since 1986, WorkAid has helped around 100,000 disadvantaged people to break the cycle of poverty and build better lives for themselves and their families. A very cool project to support or help! 🙂
After our early detours, we were then planning to push on and find a Britstop location in the Midlands to stay over at. We used to live up here in Leicester, and my older sister still does, and having not seen her for a good few years, we decided to drop by with a surprise visit to say hello. So we headed off to the picturesque village of Clipston hoping to see if they were in or not… fortunately, happy days, both my sister and husband were in! 🙂
It was really great to catch up! Since we had last caught up, my sister had been very busy tracing our family history. Fascinating to find out that our Grandfathers Uncle was John Thornton Down VC and he had won the Victoria Cross down in New Zealand in 1863! Also turned out that we had quite a lot of family history from Australia as well! I’m going to try to help her put the information together in some form of graphical/digital format in the future so we can have a record of the family history.
Before we knew it, one thing lead to another and before we knew it we were having supper and had the offer of beds for the night! Life on the road had started rather comfortably on our first day, we could get used to this!
