Sunday 27 September 2015

At last we have Kevin.

After we had spent a few days in Aberystwyth visiting brother no. 2, we checked to see if our Kevin parts had arrived.  In the country but not yet at the dealers.  We decided to go back to Cheshire and stay with best friends Paul and Anne again as they were closer to the dealership.
 
Bracken plays hide and seek for the last time with Millie
 
We stayed in Cheshire for 3 nights and to kill a bit of time, visited Delamere Forest. Had a lovely long walk and rounded it off with lunch at the visitor centre.  One thing I will say is that we are experiencing all sorts of different coffee.
 
"You will have an adventure"
 
On Thursday, we were told we could collect Kevin at 4 o'clock so we meandered down to Market Drayton to pick him up and leave my Mazda for the Insurance salvage squad.  The next part of the logistics involved yet another stay with Paul & Anne so we could load Kevin up with our stuff that was sitting in GJs car.  This vehicle is spending some time staying with P & A until we come back to Blighty to pick it up.  Thank goodness for good friends with lotsa land!  Cor!, this has taken some organising but at least we haven't had to waste time selling the Mazda.
On Friday we finally started off our journey down the country at about 12.30 which meant we had to stop half way down at Ludlow (the Midlands foodie capital)!  We found a lovely site, very well organised, with electric hook-up and Wifi.  We decided that we might stay for two nights so that GJ could do a bit of work on Kevin and I could catch up with the blog etc.  That night (as I wasn't very organised with food) we decided to walk into Ludlow which was advertised as being "close".  The walk took about 40 minutes and as you can imagine, at quite a pace with a promise of a beer at the end of it.  Unfortunately, Ludlow seems to be quite a Conservative town and all the eateries seemed to be restaurants with no admission for dogs.  We did however find a fish and chip shop and we sat (well, actually stood) by the river and devoured them before tramping the 40 mins. back to camp.  Fortunately we had some wine (but then, when do we not!) to come back to and had a right giggle when we tried to make up the large bed from the U shaped lounge area in Kevin.  Needless to say we decided not to stay another night at Ludlow because I was still on a promise for a meal out.
 
After our first night's sleep - or not!
Slight problem with the sleeping arrangements,  there isn't really any room for Bracken to sleep in the body of the van very comfortably so we have broken one of our rules and allowed him to bunk up with us.  This, in theory wouldn't be a problem because the bed makes up to a super super king size so there is plenty of room for us all, but unfortunately Bracken thought that it would be great to just stretch out completely and force me into a corner - once he is asleep, wild horses couldn't move him.  Then the other problem was that because our bedding is only king size, there was a strip down my side of the bed that was uncovered as a consequence of Bracken's contentedness.  Brrrr....
Anyway onward and upward (or downward to Devon & Cornwall).
H, GJ & Bracken - Mileage so far 100 miles.


1 comment:

  1. I don't think I've mentioned how awful the coffee is out here......

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