We bought her from a friend and former colleague three years ago. Even then she was old. One hundred and twenty-eight thousand on the clock and painted in a patchwork of oxidised reds. Red vehicles are all the more prone to it when you live near the sea. But it was a good way in - to find out whether we liked the campervan experience without breaking the bank. On the inside, the cupboards were a mixture of bare wood and black - dark and gloomy, but in those last few months before I finally hung up my abacus and took early retirement, Ali painted the inside white, and furnished her with curtains and fresh bedding. It was a bit like owning a cottage on wheels. With a high roof and a long wheelbase, we could stand up and move around without bashing our heads on the underside of the roof, and there was enough room for a pull out bed, a stove, a sink, a fridge, and an onboard porta potti in a two foot wide cubicle laughingly called “the bathroom.” With solar panels on the roof and a pile of electrical gubbins I’ll never even begin to fully understand, we were fully equipped to disappear into the wilderness - at least for as long as we could before the porta potti needed emptying. My brother saw a photo of her, misread the “Breizh” sticker on the back door and named her Brenda. “Bestow her with love, and you’ll be rewarded with adventures that you previously thought only belonged to other people.” One of you wrote that - it remained with me as a mantra. My practical skills are pretty much zero, so we found a man who can, who among other things updated some of the innards, removed an ineffective solar panel and replaced the old three way fridge with a shiny new compressor model that barely uses any electricity at all.
At first, the very thought of driving her was quite unnerving. Even though she was installed with a reversing camera, I was convinced I’d be maiming innocents every time I had to manoeuvre her in a backwards direction. But we didn’t buy her as an outhouse for the garden (although at times she doubles up nicely as a summerhouse), and so began the adventures - mostly day trips around the coast at home in Cornwall, but in the first couple of months we spent a long weekend in the Brecon Beacons of South Wales, and then a couple of nights in the wilds of Dartmoor. After I retired, there was no big overseas escapade as the world was still in the grip of a pandemic, and so we returned to the Brecon Beacons for another vanventure. Driving her was beginning to be fun. At awkward moments in narrow lanes, cars would almost immediately back down and start reversing whenever they saw us coming towards them. In the following couple of years we were back in Wales, the New Forest, Exmoor and Dartmoor again, as well as regular trips to the coast at home, just to keep her ticking over. But I always hoped we’d eventually manage to take her up to Scotland. After two years of false starts that came from outside factors we could do little about, this summer we made that trip at last.
You can’t help worrying when you’re about to drive the length of the country in a seventeen year old campervan. The number of moving parts, elderly moving parts, seemed almost to invite something to go wrong. But our mechanic has always insisted that these old diesel engines love a long run, and so it proved as we gradually and deliberately zigzagged our way north, via Cardiff and then the Peak District. So many potholes and loose drain covers, that made me shudder every time I failed to avoid one. But in all weathers, from Mediterranean Shropshire to monsoon like Cumbria, Brenda just got on with the job, quietly and without complaint.
My favourite thing about having a van is going to places you never thought of visiting before. Such as here, driving back from Inverness to Glencoe, but via the Cairngorms National Park route. The higher driving position can often help you see things you might otherwise miss. This sudden picture window view of the River Spean snaking towards the mountains, which I think must be somewhere around the Ben Nevis range (answers on a postcard please), was one we wouldn’t have seen if we’d driven back along Loch Ness. Thankfully a layby appeared to our left, so I could jump out with the camera, before jumping back in and shooting through the open sliding door as another burst of rain drenched the landscape. “We could be in Switzerland,” was Ali’s verdict. When you live in Cornwall, you have to go a long way to see mountains.
We’re still debating where to go next, but it may well be time to look at ferry bookings for next spring. In the meantime, more of those day rides at home - just to keep things ticking over.
