Motorhoming
NB: Few pictures, possibly poor spelling….motorhome publishing….a sign of the times!!!
Holiday Holy Grail
I don’t know about you, but every year I spend a lot of time seeking ‘family-friendly’ holidays that may actually deliver the rest, fun and restoration we desperately crave.
We’ve tried Air B&B home and away, visiting international family, Centre Parcs and now finally a motorhome, in search of that Holy Grail!
Trying to Please my Husband
As my husband usually vetoes a long break, because he doesn’t get holiday pay and worships Mammon, I felt we needed one…??? Too manifest this, I threw in a motorised vehicle, he loves to drive. I chose Scotland as our destination because we’re considering moving there, this would be a scenic way to view our potential new home country and being of Nordic descent he prefers a colder clime.
Parenting Differences
Of course, certain fixed factors continually threaten our ability to obtain holiday ‘success’, over which I have no or limited control, such as my husband! He is of the mindset to allow our children to spend their entire waking hours on their electronic devices. This type of mindless entertainment never fails to deliver some really unwelcome attitude and very poor judgement?!
Literally, my uncoordinated son becomes more butter-fingered than usual and we can always expect some very messy accident immediately after play?! Add to this an abundance of illegal sugary snacks, because he thinks I should similarly relax my attitude over the intake of this poison; which has the effect of turning my kids into hippie crack psychos! *JoyDivision
Quick but essential rant!
Why are men SO frickin thick and in denial about these things? You/They don’t get obvious links, like high doses of sugar and horrendous out of control behaviour, regular meals are needed to mitigate low blood sugar level tantrums and between blue light entertainment and shitty bad manners…. And you/they then think it’s fine to lose it with the poor child, whose little body is simply reacting to all this shite????? IT’S NOT THEIR FAULT, IT’S YOURS!!!!
Children Don’t Know Best
I don’t think it’s a treat to over load my children’s kidneys with sugar or damage their brains by dulling their creativity through mindless blue-lit entertainment. Children are by their very nature, generally, in capable of making good decisions about their diet and life style!
Thus, I attempt to enforce regular doses of fresh air, vegetables and exercise for all…and get called a boring nag because I can’t just let them all ‘be’….’Be’ bloody what? Twattingly difficult so my holiday peace gets shattered a million times a day????
Happy Families
Admittedly it has got slightly easier now the children are getting older, 5 and 7. However, that is just marginally, Lollipop still wakes up at the crack of dawn and insists on waking everyone up with his singing and persistent questioning of…”is it morning day yet?” I can’t function without sleep, ZZZZZ, so convert into a swearing old crone. The kids oscillate between being best friends, annoying hysteria and full on warfare. And my husband enjoys delivering a continuous spiel of complaints, which takes me to another level of personal hell!
Anyway, back to this Year’s holiday hell…. SORRY, adventure……
Ignoring the Misgivings
Having located a motorhome hire place fairly near where we live that still had vans available, with the added bonus of being new, I decided to take one at vast expense. However, to an anal freak like me, a new van felt like this was kismet…. I should have realised something wasn’t quite cricket, well I sort of did but chose to ignore it, when the communication was all a bit lackadaisical and often ignored.
Poor Time for Decision Making
But my recent slicing and dicing took up all my spare head space and then suddenly there we were, 6 days after….and off! It’s never a good idea to leave all the decision-making to a women entering menopause?!
Wrong Van
And true to form, things started to go wrong from the get go…They offered us another couple of vans the day before departure, claiming they were busy & this was easier for them? Getting the chance to unpack in a more organised manner was very attractive to a post-surgical me….so I chose one over the phone and my Husband came back with the other one! Not sure why the guy let him choose the wrong one after we’d had a lengthy conversation?! His wife was similarly nonplussed by this!
Wedded Bliss
Of course, it had to be returned the following day, but not before a white van managed to remove the right wing-mirror?! Both beds were up 2 enormous ladders (not ideal with a belly full of stitches) and the living quarters were dark and small… Less than ideal for 2 weeks in a potentially wet Scotland! WTF was my husband thinking? Turns out he only heard one piece of information regarding all the related content I’d given him over the preceding days…the kids wanted bunk beds and this option was the only out of the 2 that got close to that…forget about Me!
Not Even a Spoon
So here we found ourselves with the original ‘new’ van, which in the end didn’t deliver on my prized cleanliness…. I found all manner of things along with the dirt in the storage areas…a sanitary pad was my all-time fav! And thus, I had to clean and unpack at a 100mph so we could arrive at my in-laws, before it became so late at night it was pointless. A highly undesirable state of affairs, there was no real time to check anything through, the setting of the future tone and a HUGE mistake! Though I did find a lack of cutlery, which I was promised there would be…luckily being such a clean freak I’d brought my own!
Guillotine Table
The supposed ‘Induction’ my husband had had the previous day, on a different machine, soon became obviously way too basic; to put it mildly! A couple of hours after set off, it became apparent that there was no obvious way to stop the table sliding backwards and forwards like a malevolent guillotine whenever we took a corner. Thus, as each small child was already belted in at a corner, they were tasked with holding it in place…for the journey; luckily largely on straight roads! It wasn’t established, until 48 hrs into the holiday, and the first available moment anyone had the chance to investigate further, a number of bloody screws were missing.
Can’t Reverse
Fortuitously, sort of, whilst rifling around for the wretched instruction manual to try to establish why the reverse camera packed up after the first main stop, my husband found the missing screws in a random plastic bag. This resulted in him having to rebuild the whole damn thing… in an extremely bad mood generated by the continual string of annoying faults! The reverse camera still stubbornly refuses to work, despite hours and hours of inspection and testing. This in itself warranted its own mini freak-out, as he contemplated all the additional costs he could potentially wrack-up from blindly manoeuvring this massive beast; he is super risk averse – we didn’t move again for 3 days whilst he built up the courage!
No Running Water
Which wasn’t great because, on Day 1 we found out another piece of essential kit was missing, the clean water hose connector?! Thus, was void so we couldn’t refill the water tank; having your own supply of running water is one of the fundamental points of this machine! Thank God some kindly relatives visited us and were able to drive him to the nearest DIY store to purchase another one!
No Post Operative Rest & Recovery for Me
Then we discovered on Day 2, not only couldn’t we re-fill without haphazard, we couldn’t drain our dirty water away either; the grey waste pipe was also missing. Cue me using the washing up bowl (the basis of another argument about me bringing everything including the kitchen sink – just as well I am a bit ‘Mary Poppins’ or we’d have been Royally fucked) about 50 times to empty the damn thing because the overflow smelt of last night’s broccoli water…unbearable. My husband had lost the will to live at this point…even though all the exertion wasn’t really a good ideal for me! Cross words echoed around the lush and peaceful campsite…
Catalogue of Never Ending Errors
Other mishaps to date include:
Shit Overflow
Day 2 the chem toilet almost overflowing, we weren’t made aware of the’ indicator light’? Discovery the wretched grill doesn’t work???? What about all my roadside bacon sarnies?
Alarming Malfunction
Night 2, the carbon monoxide alarm deciding to randomly go off at 9.30pm, just when we were settling the kids to sleep…of course! After 30 minutes of piercing screams and frantic searches for the cause, whilst being regularly interrupted by concerned/annoyed fellow campers, we ripped the batteries out and call the night Duty Manager. He kindly lent us his, which proved along with changing the batteries, the damn thing was faulty?! This didn’t stop us from sleeping with the windows open from the associated fear of being killed in the night…we just froze instead! We still don’t have a working alarm, so death is still a risk but is and was beginning to look like a welcome release!
Fall from a Great Height
Day 3, Lollipop falling off the top bunk and down into the footwell, apparently if he’d broken his arm we were going home…. stress levels were high…luckily, he just has some very nasty bruises…which he followed up the next morning with a bad cut to his little finger by messing in a similar area. He’s now covered in cuts and bruises from a selection of minor accidents, the table of death, when folded has some ridiculously sharp edges that have caught all of us out!
Broken Wings
Day 4, the loss of another wing mirror on a narrow road…it got hit x2, the 2ndtime finished it off!
Ming into Minging
Night 4, discovering the shower door was defunct, facilitating an irritating flood and mass clean up job every time it’s used?! Frequently unfortunately, because some of the sites have put the ‘ming’ into ‘minging’.
Continuing Cluster Fuck
Tonight, the central heating stopped working, emitting a queer burning smell and we’ve run out of water….
Total Fantasy Fail
So, so, far from the glamorous fantasy I had for this holiday! This experience has been so far from relaxing, we’re locked in the wardrobe from hell….!
It’s NOT in the Fucking Handbook!
Every time I’ve tried to contact the rental company to seek their help and advice, I’ve been unhelpfully and repetitively told to read the bloody handbook! He’s read the f’ing handbook back to front so many times he could quote it verbatim; this became hysterically amusing only on one occasion, when the only page we really needed for that particular crisis was actually missing and not just plain useless?! (how to put the hot water on…fairly fundamental stuff).
Early Abortion
We’ve aborted a few days early, it’s very emotionally mature to know when to quit…dontcha know! None of us can wait to be home, to have space from one another, our own beds and deep warm baths. My kids say they can’t wait to escape all the bad language and fighting; priceless! I’ve definitely got a case of the blues from all the fighting and disappointments and I currently want a divorce….
Put Off for Life
But in one way it’s a success, I now know I don’t want another holiday like this again! It’s put me off a family holiday again until next year, when the cycle will continue. Perhaps next year, I’ll have more success if I go in search of the Golden Fleece instead. Now where’s my CBD paste?!
Motorhome Hire Advice
*My husband thinks this blog is particularly depressing, perhaps it is, but it is honest as always and I hope you’ve had a good laugh at my expense! PLUS if you ever hire a motorhome you now know what to look out for and gen up on….