Not me (though I'm carrying a bit more timber than when I was a twenty five year-old racing snake); the caravan.

I know that we've got a maximum weight we can go up to (combination of unladen and payload and MTPLMs and MIROs, Giros and Biros), but sometimes I wonder if I should be looking at this from the other end of the telescope.

You could argue that loading up to a maximum permitted weight is just an excuse to carry stuff that, if you were being hard-nosed about it, you really don't need.

While we were packing before - and unpacking after - a proper nice long weekend in the Shropshire Hills it struck me that we've kind of lost sight of the quintessential joy of chucking a tent, a couple of changes of clothes and two pairs of walking boots into the boot of the car and heading off somewhere or other.

I'm not suggesting aiming to take the same amount of gear as a bloke about to set off on an epic solo transcontinental pushbike journey, because you buy a caravan precisely so that you don't have to rough it.

What I'm really thinking about is striking a happy medium between what appears to be your average WWB owner's attempts to take a slightly smaller version of his house (and everything in it) on holiday, and the tent and spare pair of pants approach.

We take stuff that we are unlikely to ever need, just because we can. We take clothes and never wear them all. We take food and never eat it all, and if we ran out we could go to a shop and buy some more or go to the pub. We take tools that I'm unlikely ever to use just in case we need them. Am I really likely to want to waste my holiday tinkering with something which could wait until we got home?

When all's said and done it's difficult to imagine what could break or fall off which would make the caravan less comfortable than a tent. Even if the roof stuck down all you'd have to do is stoop, and you have to do that in a tent all the time.

We take a spare torch.

Why do I take a spare torch?

Because I can.

Do I need a spare torch?

No, I don't.

I take a jack in case we have a puncture. When we bought the van it had a pair of those Kojack jacking points attached to the chassis. Sadly the Kojack bottle jack itself went walkabout at some point prior to us taking ownership, so I scoured eBay for a replacement. I got one at a good price, treated it to a change of hydraulic fluid and now it sits in its nifty black plastic case under one of the front benches.

Unused, heavy, and entirely likely to remain so. If I had a puncture at the side of a windswept Beattock motorway or on the M6 in the pissing rain and the dark, am I likely to attempt to change the wheel myself?

Am I buggery. I'd call Green Flag to do it, because we've got cover, and that's what they do.

So bearing both that and the statistical likelihood of a caravan tyre puncture in mind, why on earth am I carrying a jack at all?

Because I can.

But that's not a good enough reason, and I'm not going to any more. And I've sort of come to the conclusion that I need to apply this to what we carry in general.

And less weight is good from all points of view. Less unnecessary stuff to pack and carry and an easier life for the car. It's all very well having every nook and cranny filled with stuff we might need, but almost without exception that stuff is still cluttering the van up precisely because we didn't need it.

Now that's bad enough at home, but in the van it don't make no sense at all.




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Quote: hob wrote in post #2

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However there is a strange side of me that carries what I want rather than what I need,

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Quote: Frantone wrote in post #10

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Pete, we saw inflatable palm trees outside a tent at a site last year.
I'm thinking a bag of sand, blow up palm, a coconut or two, turn Riverside into a tropical paradise. 😎

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I think the economy savings may be smaller than you expect.
I towed a 1000kg Triton, 1300kg Troll and 900kg Familia with my last car, a diesel Touran. Whether the vans were empty or fully loaded for a month abroad my mpg differred very little on a long distance run.
The only things that differ now when I go away are whether I take the bikes, awning, how many chairs/tables and quantity of food and clothes. I leave everything else in the van.

Colin

Quote: eribaMotters wrote in post #13

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I think the economy savings may be smaller than you expect.

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