Thanks everyone. Some excellent ideas here.
But to clarify... as ex tent campers, we have several corkscrews in the kit 😂

This reminds me of when we were tent campers and the children were young teenagers. it was the first time driving long distance again after my head injury and we had booked on a site at Bidart, near Biaritz. At the time we had a small Volvo 460 and it was loaded up with everything including 4 family bikes. We stopped overnight on the way but arrived in Bidart after a long and tiring drive. As we passed a supermarket I suddenly decided that we needed bread and some drinks.I had become good at making irrational decisions on the spur of the moment.

I got a trolley and the offers were fabulous. I came out with a trolley with a pile of wine & beer almost as big as Colin's. Kath had taken the kids for a toilet stop and an ice cream. I had loaded the drink into the Volvo where the children sat and there was now no room for them. My damaged brain wasn't at its best & I was not very popular with the family when I declared that we could squeeze everything in, and that I couldn't possibly leave the drinks. They were not in the best of moods after such a long drive.

I had to take the drinks out, fit the children in and then pile this gigantic hoard literally on top of them. We then had to crawl to the campsite fortunately only a couple of miles away on a minor road. We must have looked like exceptionally heavy drinkers as all you could see in the rear of the car was two sets of eyes and boxes of beer and wine.

This has gone down in family folklore and written off as a sign of my brain damage. Thank goodness it was a Volvo and not our previous Ford. My piles of beer and wine no longer resemble anything like Colin's stack of goodies! We live & learn.......MikeT

Colin, that wifi booster looks good but of course one needs a password for most networks, some are free like my neighbour's!

Just reminded me of a little incident a few years ago. Checking in to a C&CC site and waiting patiently behind the bloke in front. " Would you like access to the wifi sir, it's £3 per day?" Yes please says the bloke in front and the lady says " OK that's all sorted, the password is pond".
My turn......"Would you like wifi sir? "No , I'm fine thanks"

We’re very techie, so have all the useless gadgets 😆 although our corkscrews are multifunctional, with bottle opener functions included, so not so useless
We don’t need a TV, as we have laptops and tablets, and can download what we want from Netflix, etc, before we head off. That’s our normal for camping, so no need to change it, I think.

We live in the Netherlands, so very easy to pop down to Belgium/France for good cheap wine. From now on, though, we’ll take the caravan and make a weekend of it! Also to the Moesel in Germany for some reasonable German white wine - it is only about 3.5 hrs by car, so about 4-5 hrs with the caravan, I expect. More for a long weekend option.
It’s going to be much harder trying to get back to the UK after December I think. Hey ho, will have to see how it goes. Just hope we don’t have hassle with insurances, etc.

Someone earlier mentioned about dropping the nespresso for another coffee maker. I should clarify. I am a Brit. I drink tea, not coffee. Actually, I don’t drink tea like a Brit anymore, ( no milk or sugar) but the coffee point remains 😆. Anyway, the hubby has 3 coffee makers for the caravan. One press, one stove top, and the nespresso. Oh, and a grinder. I think he’s counting on all eventualities.

We have a similar story involving a Volvo, large quantities of wine and 3 children. The Volvo was a 240 estate. When Neil suggested that the only thing to do was leave one of the children behind I’m not sure the Frenchman parked next to us realised he was joking. We did eventually fit it all in, 2 children on the back seat, the other child in the rear seat conversion with an extremely large mountain of wine. It’s amazing what you can fit in a Volvo estate. 😁

Hi julie
I think I may have also threatened to leave the children behind whilst I transported the beer & wine to the campsite - in fairness it was only a couple of miles away and they wouldn't have been left there for long!

The kids called this dark green Volvo 460 saloon "the Tank" for obvious reasons. The one thing that they did like was it was the first car we ever had with some rudimentary air conditioning.........that helped keep the beer cool! MikeT

I think it was the Remoska that did it.

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Seeing as how lockdown has now cmee to an end are there any sites open tomorrow?

Where did you read that ?

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