Bye Bye Hollie!

After our last motorhome trip to the Outer Hebrides we made the decision to change our motorhome to a campervan. It’s shorter and narrower and more suited to the type of adventures we wanted to go on. August then became a rather stressful month as we got Hollie ready for sale and then finally sold her whilst also trying to agree the purchase of a campervan. On the third attempt to spend lots of money, we were successful! So please give a warm welcome to “Donut”  our brand-new campervan, (long story on the name – just accept it’s a bit wacky). Donut is just under 6m long and just over 2m wide. It’s full of gadgets and feels much more comfortable than our previous 14 year-old motorhome.

 

 

It took us the best part of a week to get Donut kitted out and us moved in. As it’s smaller, there is less storage, so we had to downsize some of our gear and reduce our wardrobe (as there isn’t one on this vehicle). For our inaugural trip, we went to Wales starting with a long weekend on Shell Island a much-loved campsite on Cardigan Bay, near Llanbedr. This coincided with a Bavarian themed Oktoberfest so we joined in for a couple of nights of Omperstomping, frankfurters, schnitzels and beers. Great fun but we’ll avoid that weekend next time as we’re not up to dancing on tables!

We headed inland through Machynlleth and Dolgellau and then stopped to explore the ruins of Castell y Bere, one of Llewellyn the Great’s castles. It oversees rich pasturelands and has a view across to the Cambrian Mountain of Cadair Idris. This triggered a trip down memory lane for Ian of a Scout summer camp when, at the tender age of 12, he’d climbed that very mountain. It hadn’t looked that high (893m or 2,930 ft) when they’d started out, so it seems to have made a lasting impression on the poor boy.

Elan valley was our next park up; it’s a series of valleys that were dammed in 1893 to create a chain of 4 reservoirs to supply Birmingham with fresh water. Tree-lined with rocky outcrops; this stunning scenery is riddled with trails. Ian went on a wander and discovered the remains of a fifth smaller dam which had originally been erected to supply water to the builders of the dams. During WWII this dam was used to test out the deployment of the Dam Busters bomb. As the project was a success, there is hardly anything left to see and nature has done a lot to reclaim the ruins!

After a couple of nights in the Brecon Beacons; where we saw (and heard) training jets practise low altitude flying through the valleys, we headed to an old family favourite, a campsite close to St Davids in Pembrokeshire. It was a Friday and it was blowing a hooley, I’m so glad we weren’t in a tent. Storm Amy was rocking the van, but we were snug as bugs in the warmth of Donut’s embrace. This idyllic calm was somewhat shattered when Ian got a phone call from the campervan dealership telling us that we had the wrong registration for the van and they needed to put new number plates on immediately! Not so easy to do when you’re halfway through a trip around Wales and a 5 hour drive away. A solution was agreed; they would post the new plates to the campsite for Ian to swap over. We couldn’t leave until we’d got them and I’m so relieved that we hadn’t been pulled over by the police for driving a vehicle with false number plates (we do have a receipt for the van with us). Over the weekend the weather calmed and as the sun returned, we went exploring, catching glimpses of seals feeding their cubs on the beaches and fishing with cormorants in the bays.

Monday came and midday passed with no sign of the new van number plates. So we booked to stay an extra night and tried to relax. It was creeping towards teatime before our guaranteed “next day by 1pm” delivery arrived. This wasn’t a complete surprise as the campsite is quite remote. After huge sighs of relief, we were able to set off the next day and head around the coast to Haverfordwest for groceries before driving past the town and oil refineries of Milford Haven. This is one of the few natural deep water ports in the world, so there are some rather large tankers heading past St Annes Point. During WWII it was considered to be a potential target so the coastline around here is dotted with forts and lookouts from that era. The refinery and the remains of the outposts make a stark contrast to the beauty of this wild and rugged coastline.

We headed on to Camarthenshire and a fabulous campsite on a headland with views stretching from the Gower Peninsula to Tenby. At low tide Ian discovered the remains of Rover, a 71ft schooner transporting a cargo of culm (coal dust) to Wexford, that ran aground during a gale force 11 storm in 1886. 

It’s been a lovely getaway with Donut the campervan despite the issues with the number plates and being battered by Storm Amy. Wales has a spectacular coastline and it never disappoints, I’m sure we’ll be back very soon especially now that we can fit along the narrower lanes, squeeze over tighter bridges and get into campsites with length restrictions of 6m max! It was particularly fun to see the “Cheshire Cat” grin on Ian’s face on that very first day when a fellow camper said she had “van envy”. I think we got the right one, we certainly like it and we’ve only blown one fuse so far!