Quote: Aaron Calder wrote in post #1

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What first attracted you to an Eriba?

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I honestly can't remember.

I can't even remember why it was that I even considered getting a caravan at all since they'd always been anathema to me; from years of getting stuck behind the bloody things on the road to the kind of weird and anal people who seemed to own them.

Like several others on here we'd camped for years and years, in our case mostly as a consequence of working on archaeological digs in Montgomeryshire and Shropshire for a succession of summers from the mid seventies to the late nineties when both of the digs went into semi-permanent hibernation. As our family grew so did the size of the tents, and at least three of them are still in the attic, a happy reminder of halcyon days.

We never even gave caravans a second look. We never saw the appeal of tugging a smaller version of our house and most of its appurtenances around behind us, hamstringing our enjoyment of whatever car we happened to have at the time, and to be honest we still don't.

To this day I'm still slightly ashamed to admit to letting a wry smile flit across my ugly mug whenever we saw a pile of metal, plastic and perforated hardboard which had been swept onto the verge at the bottom of a precipitous descent somewhere in Scotland, though needless to say I would never have wished ill on the poor folks who had been towing it and whose holiday had been utterly ruined as a consequence.

My only thought at the time was that at least it wasn't holding any other road users up any more.

And I know that thought was shared by many, many others too.

Times change. Attitudes change.

They changed for me some time in 2008 when I had either an epiphany or a funny turn, and I still can't work out which it was or what on earth prompted it.

We began by looking at T@Bs - the littlest one - and I suppose it was while we were mulling them over in a not-too-interested kind of way that I happened to come across Eribas somewhere on the net.

And that was that, really. I showed Mrs Pete, and while on one hand she made several encouraging noises about them, she also made several faintly surprised and even more disparaging ones in relation to my apparent volte-face regarding caravans in general. My father-in-law never let me forget it either, bless him.

Our first one was a brand-spankers 230GT from Lechlade which we had for a couple of years before an unpleasant twist in our financial circumstances obliged us to sell it to Steve at AL. While we had it, it was everything we hoped it would be and we were very sad to see it go.

In 2011 we came into a bit of dosh and rather rashly decided that the first thing we would do with some of it was get another one, but this time one which overcame the only real shortcoming of the 230, namely its lack of a toilet.

I'd been mulling over what we'd get to replace it with and had decided in a rather optimistic way that our absolute ideal van would be a long bed Troll.

I emailed Steve and mentioned this to him, hardly expecting anything more than a courteous acknowledgement let alone the one which fell into my inbox a week or so later.

It asked if we'd like to come and have a look at a 2008 540 which someone had traded in for a 420 because the geezer who owned it had moved house and the Troll was about three inches too long to fit on his drive.

We went, looked it over and said yes on the spot.

And here we are.

I've fiddled with it and changed or added one or two things to satisfy the inveterate tinkerer in me, and succumbed to the overwhelming temptation to get a proper awning for it, though I do think that because we came into this game from the austerity of a tent we've hopefully avoided the temptation to fill every nook and cranny with gubbins we don't need just because we've got the space. We still stuff clothes into lockers rather than putting them neatly on clothes hangers in the wardrobe, and I hope we always will.

We're camping after all, not attending Glyndebourne.

I'm still ambivalent about caravans in general, but not these ones. I still think a lot of the people who own caravans - not these ones - are weird and anal, and I still don't understand this obsession they have with playing house in the middle of a field somewhere to the extent of taking a vacuum cleaner with them or spending half a day up a pair of steps (which they presumably also brought with them) washing and polishing the damned thing.

Still, as Napoleon said, chacun à son goût.


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