It all starts here...

We took delivery of the "big box" machine on Tuesday this week. It had seemed to me to get bigger every time I went to see it before delivery and when I finally got to drive it away it didn't seem to have got any smaller. To be fair it is 7.5 m. long, 3.1 m. high and 2.3 m. wide, so it doesn't fit into many car parks unless they cater for buses and HGV's.

We went over everything with the dealers to make sure it worked and decided to accept the couple of things that didn't. I then drove it down to my brother-in-law's hotel in the New Forest, the only place anywhere near here which has enough space to park it up. Here is the beast (it doesn't include the caravan next to it, though, and note that even in the UK we do get clear blue skies sometimes):

This is what it looks like inside:

The van handles nicely up to about 70 mph although overtaking trucks does tend to be a bit unsettling - there is a huge amount of "windage" so that slight surge you get in a car when you overtake a truck becomes rather more significant in the van. Still, if you grit your teeth and hang on you get past without swerving all over the road, so we'll get used to it!

There is a bunch of stuff to be done on it, I decided to fit a refillable gas supply for cooking and heating so we can top it up at LPG service stations - using Calor bottles over the Channel is a bit difficult as the suppliers there won't accept them for replacement. So if you run low you have to buy theirs. I also have a neat system for removing loo smells but it does need fitting. Those are the first two - I expect we'll think of others when we have tried living in it for a while.

More in a while....