We have entered into a new era of our camping adventures. In January this year we purchased a VW California camper van. When we went to see it in the garage we fell in love with it straight away.
We conducted a fair amount of research before purchasing and we found the VW California Club to be a fantastic and extremely useful source of good quality information and its members all seem to have a wealth of knowledge and experience of all things 'California.'
What an amazing investment this has been so far and I can honestly say that I am amazed by how versatile and functional this vehicle is as well as being a lot of fun.
The day we picked it up we honestly considered sleeping in it on our driveway but managed to restrain ourselves until we took it away for our first adventure that weekend. Instead we busied ourselves filling the abundance of storage space and adding a few personal touches to the interior.
We spent a lot of time pushing buttons and opening and closing things to find out how everything works and we had a few nervous moments putting the roof up and down as we had heard so many horror stories of the fabric getting caught in the roof mechanism but we plucked up the courage and were relieved at how easy it was to do.
Our first weekend away couldn't arrive fast enough and we definitely made the right choice booking a lovely small campsite just outside of Chichester called The Osiers where we had a hardstanding pitch and the place to ourselves! There were some lovely country lanes for walking and a nice selection of near(ish) pubs (at least 15 mins walk.) We particularly enjoyed our lunch at the The White Swan in Bosham - very tasty food and well worth a visit. It was a shame that we didn't have beautiful clear skies for the whole weekend but at least we were able to enjoy it for a few hours.
Things we learned on our first weekend away in the California:
1. Trying to fill up the water tank without a hose is pretty much an impossible task.
2. Spilling a large glass of red wine all over the interior is not the best way to start a weekend - the van is now called 'Rioja' (thank goodness we decided to have the van GuardX treated!)
3. The pop up roof can withstand some serious gusts of wind and heavy rain.
4. Two wet dogs (one of which is a not-quite-house-trained puppy) adds a lot of mud and fair amount of anxiety to the mix.
5. The diesel aux heater is amazing!
6. Getting lost on our morning walk and walking an extra 3 miles (in the pouring rain) to get back to base and then having to spend an hour washing and drying the dogs because you don't want them to get the new van dirty is exhausting/not fun.
7. Being able to plug in a hairdryer makes the task of drying the dogs much easier.
8. We don't need to pack the kitchen sink - we already have one ;-)
9. The fridge is surprisingly spacious and efficient.
10. The roof bed is very comfortable and sleeping up there is not as cold as we thought it was going to be.
This is only the beginning, there is so much more to learn and we are going to have a lot of fun (and maybe a few disagreements) along the way.
