After 4 days on the road we, Tigger II and the pikey box made it to Spain in one piece. Hooray and much relief.
I had been concerned about the box getting wet and the plywood falling apart ('coz I is cheap and only bought lightweight non-marine ply), it blowing apart on the road at speed, wind getting in the holes in the front where some long stuff was sticking out and blowing the doors off the back, it going sideways at a roundabout as there was quite a bit of weight up high as it was completely full, or it otherwise failing and leaving a trail of debris through France and the Pyrenees, or getting pulled over by the rozzers to be told in foreign that I am not allowed to do such things on vehicles on their roads. As it turned out the journey was quite uneventful.
We did stick to the back roads mostly and tried to cruise control at 90kph which everything seemed happy at, although France does seem to have grown a huge amount of roundabouts at every imaginable junction on the non-toll roads which are interesting in a vehicle with weight up high. I guess in many ways its good practise for building Campalot - it will be larger and heavier still, but probably the centre of gravity will be a little lower.
We tried to follow parts of the route we used to take when i was a kid and the family drove down every 2 years, initially in a VW camper that was the same 1965 vintage as me, and later in a Renault 16 and caravan. Most of those trips went to the Bilbao region initially and then back from Barcelona to the channel, but at least one trip when I was navigating we came to Barcelona directly. Much of that route is now motorway grade toll roads so we tried to avoid them, but we did cross the Dordogne river just north of Cahors over an old stone bridge that rang bells, and there was a municipal campground on the banks that could have been where we stayed one night and hung bottles of drinks in a shopping bag in the river to cool them off as we had no fridge. Or it could have been somewhere completely different - every thing i thought I knew about family and childhood has been corrected by other family members lately, so why should this one be any different?
Need to run around and buy some bits of furniture tomorrow so will keep the box for a couple more days, then it will be time to strip it down and get back to a normal vehicle, at least for a few weeks....
I had been concerned about the box getting wet and the plywood falling apart ('coz I is cheap and only bought lightweight non-marine ply), it blowing apart on the road at speed, wind getting in the holes in the front where some long stuff was sticking out and blowing the doors off the back, it going sideways at a roundabout as there was quite a bit of weight up high as it was completely full, or it otherwise failing and leaving a trail of debris through France and the Pyrenees, or getting pulled over by the rozzers to be told in foreign that I am not allowed to do such things on vehicles on their roads. As it turned out the journey was quite uneventful.
We did stick to the back roads mostly and tried to cruise control at 90kph which everything seemed happy at, although France does seem to have grown a huge amount of roundabouts at every imaginable junction on the non-toll roads which are interesting in a vehicle with weight up high. I guess in many ways its good practise for building Campalot - it will be larger and heavier still, but probably the centre of gravity will be a little lower.
We tried to follow parts of the route we used to take when i was a kid and the family drove down every 2 years, initially in a VW camper that was the same 1965 vintage as me, and later in a Renault 16 and caravan. Most of those trips went to the Bilbao region initially and then back from Barcelona to the channel, but at least one trip when I was navigating we came to Barcelona directly. Much of that route is now motorway grade toll roads so we tried to avoid them, but we did cross the Dordogne river just north of Cahors over an old stone bridge that rang bells, and there was a municipal campground on the banks that could have been where we stayed one night and hung bottles of drinks in a shopping bag in the river to cool them off as we had no fridge. Or it could have been somewhere completely different - every thing i thought I knew about family and childhood has been corrected by other family members lately, so why should this one be any different?
Need to run around and buy some bits of furniture tomorrow so will keep the box for a couple more days, then it will be time to strip it down and get back to a normal vehicle, at least for a few weeks....
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