What a month this has been!
The whole time has been spent developing and then finally implementing a 'bright idea' we had one day (a month ago or thereabouts) at Ricote when a Brit cruised on to the parking area in a short wheelbase Winnebago Sightseer RV
As you are aware we spent most days walking the hills and what better way to pass the time than to analyise the simple notion of 'What if we bought one of those beasts?'
Most sensible folks would have walked away from the idea as indeed we did around 6 years ago when we gave it a passing thought
(We remember trawling the web and discovering some really ugly examples of what not to do to a home on wheels and having had no experience at the time of long term touring duly dismissed the idea as sheer folly)
Its a bit different now I can tell you....
This is my Girl after we'd decided to go for it!
Our first foray in to the researching idea led us to a few must haves on a prospective RV namely:
- Huge fresh water tank to enable filling up just once a week
- Large Grey & Black waste tanks so doing away with thrice weekly cassette emptying
- A built in Washer/Dryer
- Big kitchen with plenty of storage
- Big lounge with ability to rotate a cat above one's head whilst entertaining 6 adults...
- Big square comfortable bed (individual sided firmness control a bonus)
- Big external locker storage
- Ability to carry Max on the rear
- Too many internal cupboards to count...
- Vast solar arrangement up top coupled to a 3kw inverter
- Built in generator
- Basement air conditioning system
A tall order to achieve for obvious reasons....
They exist but chiefly in the States and would require a long winded import process involving some serious wonga laid out. Then the conversion to UK use and registration process should we be lucky enough to find one that met our needs and Nina's preferred layout
Clean low mileage RVs in the UK are like honest politicians...totally rare
Few sites listing what we'd like and and a few more that looked decidedly dodgy!
I opened up the website of Empire RV based in Somerset and pointed to an RV that looked OK to me but thought Nina wouldn't like tbh.
Bingo...Wifey thought it was just the ticket, a UK registered Itasca Meridian 39K (meant nothing to me at the time)
It appears Winnebago make these as a legitimate double of their Winnebago Journey and have done for many years as they do with all their 'Winnebago' models, same model same factory
(This is to avoid the US commercial competion laws in force)
My initial line was 'forget it!', there's no way that will be available when we are ready to buy nor should we buy the first RV we see
(There thats told her I thought)
A week's hunting later amongst the thousands of RVs on US sites brought us back to this one we'd first settled on...bizarre
So with trepidation I rang Empire RV up and James, the owner advised us it might be better to book a flight to Bristol and come see for ourselves what the RV had to offer
It was at this stage he pointed out that the mileage on this 11 year old coach was under 4000 miles
WHAT???
Within two days we were straight off the plane from Alicante having left our trailer with Mick & Deb and the van at the airport and viewing 'Tasca" with smiles all around....
Slightly bigger than our current van!
Lounge & Bedroom Slides
Clunky coach cab
A night in a pub close by requires some of the Dark Stuff to calm my nerves
Next day we drive (in our hire car) to the nearby Holy Cow tearooms for a full english (well it had to be done!)
Back in Tasca or 'Arvie' as Nina calls him the figures are on the large side
She can't wait trust me!
Pics that MH girls drool over...
I shoot off a load of poor iphone pics taken in the hanger and we do a deal with James that takes us a whole month to implement
Its safe to say that we've had very little sleep for a while and our lives now are busy preparing the van for sale upon our return and trying to make a sound logistical plan for taking over the RV in late June
There is a lot of additional work to be done to it but this can be done whilst we are waiting to return to the UK
We have commitments here, housesitting at Dorine & Rudys and a week with Emilja & Richard who join us round the pool mid June
Very exiting times for us for sure and we look forward to our life in the RV immensely
A big thanks to our Chums, the other four Fishes who put up with our random RV babbling whilst together at Puntas de Calnegre and without whose sound advice we would probably have gone down some very bleak corridors.....
