A Blogger in Black

After all the fun of the fair in my last blog post, the next two days in Cambridge, staying at the Caravan & Motorhome Club site in Cherry Hinton were quiet, helped partially by the rain. In truth I didn’t mind, for once there wasn’t the need to make the most of every hour, rushing around sightseeing. I was more than happy to just chill in the ‘van with a book, coffee and the phone for entertainment, punctuated by a nap. Or two. Tuesday evening I met up with a good friend, and we went for a curry at a restaurant in the High St. Cambridge is usually one of my ports of call at Christmas but with heading off to New Zealand towards the end of last year I’d not seen Pauline for at least eighteen months. Post nosh we stayed and chatted, having a great chinwag and catch up. More of the same Wednesday evening, though this time the gap was even longer. Carole and I had remained good friends since working at CBS Office Supplies in the late nineties and early noughties, however ...

Between the last trip and this I started to wonder if I was falling out of love with caravanning. There, I said it. Over the last year storage charges had gone up again, as had the car insurance and Road Tax – sorry – Vehicle Excise Duty. Things were getting very expensive and my state of mind was not helped when I started half-heartedly looking for somewhere to drag Patsy for the half-term break at the end of May. Pitch prices were getting silly and I was beginning to question whether I’d done the right thing in forking out four figures for a new front panel last year. As it was, Sandra invited me up to Chester for a few days and that sealed the deal – Patsy would stay in the storage yard at least until the summer break. I took the train to avoid driving and we had a great time. Then the news came that fellow caravanner Phil had discovered that his caravan had been stolen from the storage yard – he’d called in to take the ‘van for a service and the yard operators hadn’t noticed!...