Since we had a free weekend and a proper awning to try for the very first time, we thought we'd zoom off somewhere and try it.

So we did.

We went to a little site just outside Wells that we'd been to once before in July last year. Nothing fancy - no restaurant, no Saturday night discotheteque, no boating lake, no children's assault course with zip wires, aerial ropeways or fibreglass elephants, no wifi and no compulsorily cheery Tannoy reveille at 06:00.

A quiet field with five tidy little hardstanding pitches, somewhere to plug the caravan in and a small number of entirely adequate toilets and showers.

Just the job to practice erecting the awning without enduring the ribald laughter of hordes of hardened caravanners half tanked on Hardy Chardy or Blue Nun.

We got there at about 16:18:46 on Friday afternoon, screw-anchored the dogs out of range and upended the pole bag. We hammered in the last rock peg at 10:06 on Sunday...

Actually, it all went quite astonishingly well - a testament to the quality of the awning rather than anything else.

When it was up, we stood in it.

Compared to anything we've had before it was so bloody huge that we felt like the last two stragglers after a wedding reception in a marquee. We put the Troll's rolled steel joist table in it, under the rear side window and in a place convenient for the dinky little Lidl oven we'd bought a couple of weeks earlier to be plugged in.

We opened the oven door and dreamed briefly of baked potatoes, imagining the smell and melting knobs of creamy butter. We closed the door again, and arranged our two chairs on the inexpensive awning carpet in the casual manner that the generous space afforded.

There was still enough room left over to have enjoyed a vigorous game of quoits, polo or even badminton, had we remembered to bring a shuttlecock.

What in heaven's name do people put in there to fill the space?

Busts of Roman emperors on stunted Doric columns? A grand piano? Swaying palms in huge terracotta pots? A string quartet or a Mariachi band? Displays of classic motorcycles?

Anyway. Apart from having to shout to each other when we were in diagonally opposite corners, it was whizzo. In every sense of the word. So thank you, Martin (chezmart).

It's worth every penny, and a huge success. Literally.

The rest of the weekend was ace, except for the unexpected and irritating failure of the microswitch in the kitchen tap. Still, the working tap in the bathroom was only four feet away, so it wasn't that much of a nuisance. I've got a genuine Reich replacement which cost nine quid coming tomorrow, so I'll put a relay in at the same time as replacing the switch.

We went to Wells on Saturday, including a visit to the completely fantastic Wells Reclamation just down the road towards Glastonbury. You must have been to those architectural salvage places before. This was one of those, but much, much bigger and much, much better.

Fancy a cold war Bloodhound surface-to-air missile? A full-sized version of Rodin's Thinker in concrete? A two ton cast-iron bull complete with appropriately-sized cast-iron testicles? Old radiators, doors, tables, windows, slates, bricks, sleepers, beams, joists, purlins, tiles and slates? A Bath stone pediment or a Soviet T34 tank? Taps, baths, sinks, old enamel signs and period light fittings?

It's the place to go. Really.

Yesterday we went to Shaftesbury. First time either of us had been. We pottered around, and went down Hovis Hill, which was nice. Later in the afternoon we climbed up to the Iron Age hill fort at Cadbury and stood on the top of the outer bank, squinting across a distantly misty countryside lit by a slanting sun shining out of a powder-blue March sky.

Marvellous.

We could see the Chilterns, the Cheviots, the Cotswolds, the Cumbrian Fells, the Carpathians and the Caucasus. The Canadian Rockies were just visible too; the faintest of blue-grey smudges on the far distant horizon a whisker north of west. You could see why those Iron Age geezers chose to build their fort there despite the thrum of traffic from the A303.

All in all a very good shakedown. Everything worked, with the exception of the two or three things that didn't. We even fired up the blown-air Truma and blew some air around, 'cos it was a trifle taters at night.

We huddled together, us and the dogs, sharing body heat, drinking unintentionally ice-cold Montepulciano D'Arbruzzo (seven notes a pop from Waitrose) and breathing in the smell of burning dust from the heater.

It was sublime.

But then it mostly is.

Are we to take it that you enjoyed yourselves Pete?

Hello Taffy

It's Pine Tree Farm, Wells. They do have a website, but it isn't much of a website.

There are a couple more photos I took last year in the campsites section of the picture gallery on here.

It's owned by a lovely lady who runs the farm with her son. She only charged us £15 a night for everything; pitch, hookup, awning, dogs - the lot.

Quote: crow wrote in post #8

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But did you see the Apache Helicopter?

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Zitat

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Quote Pepe le Pew :- What in heaven's name do people put in there to fill the space?

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What you need now is an extension :- g8p38-Clairval-Awning-Extension.html