Another Mid-Life Crisis…

I seem to have these every so often and at the moment I am hankering for a VW Kombi again. A couple of companies (Danbury and VW Kampers) import the old Type 2 van from where it is still made in Brazil and convert them into campervans, the only thing is they are about £35k each. Even the original ones and the older more iconic split-screen versions are incredibly expensive here, good ones easily demanding £15k.

We went out on Saturday to see if I could get it out of me system by visiting a motor home show. On the way we came across signs for Dubs at the Park, and so a detour was made and we found ourselves in the grounds of an old stately home crawling with old Volkswagens. There were some absolutely gorgeous examples of the splitty and bay window vans to be seen, and some were for sale, but even tatty old bangers were going for more then you would expect.

After wiping the drool off my chin we carried on to the Southern Motor Caravan Show were we found ourselves amongst all manner of sizes and shapes of motor homes, nearly all white panel work outside and dreadful chintz upholstery inside. Some were huge with lounges bigger than ours at home, but all had the feeling of old people’s homes on wheels. Some of them were very reasonably priced, in comparison to the vee-dubs we had just seen, but even the smallest ones were too big when you don’t have off street parking, and none could be used as your day-to-day runabout.

I started to realise it wasn’t a camper van that I wanted, but a VW Kombie van.

It was further complicated when we looked inside one of the static homes that was finished to look like a log cabin. Rather than the old fashioned soft furnishings and traveller external paintwork, this one was more for the holiday park market and had all the mod-cons inside, flat screen TV above the stylish wall mounted fire, piped music throughout, a fully fitted kitchen with double door American style fridge, an suite wet room and a bright and airy feel inside. We had a moment there where we started to mentally go through the possibility of selling our house, buying the cabin and having it located in some picturesque country local and still buying the camper van… …we shook our heads and decided to leave before the dark side over powered us.

After the motor home show we went on to Cliveden, a lovely former home of the Astor’s and now a grand hotel. We had a walk about and tea in the orangey, but it was getting late and the wind outside was making strolling about unpleasant, so we continued on into the city where we planned to meet some Kiwi friends of ours.

We met at the Punch and Judy on Covent Garden for a quick drink before relocating to a lovely nearby restaurant where we spent a lovely few hours over dinner chatting and catching up on what we had all been doing over that intervening period. It was a great evening, but with all the running about we had done we were glad to get back home and tumble into our bed.