June 01, 2004
Long weekend
Caravanning is something that old people do when they have way too much time on their hands. Well, that's what I had thought, up until 7pm last Friday evening. I had been roped into going to one of these towed homes for the long weekend, and thus, I expected a nice longweekend filled with lots of free time on my hands to do lots of knitting, thumb-twiddling and bird watching, and time enough to exclaim "Gosh, old boy!" in a very dignified manner.
So, I trundled along past Oxford, and through the Thames vally to finally get to this little corner of retiree paradise not looking forward to it in the least. But what I was to discover was that this caravan wasn't the type of caravan to be towed around by snobby Landcruiser owners. It was fixed, with all mod-cons; BBQ, running hot water, Electricity (what?!), TV, and even a Sony Playstation. It was like an uber caravan, a whole 3 bedroom house on wheels. And what made everything so much better was that it wasn't accessible via the road. Totally isolated from civilisation.
To get to this little layed back corner of the world, you had to wait patiently while the ferryman (or spotty-ferry-teen in this instance) guided his small ricketty vessel over the calm and unhurried waters of the River Avon. With so much of this seemingly misplaced unhurriedness, it was easy to get impatient. It's then easy to resign yourself to being trapped in ferry-hell while standing on the riverbank, but by then, most people have spotted the bar looking out over the river. Indifference and impatiance soon gives way to relaxation when the neighbourhood family of swans (Mummy, Daddy, and five little bratty cygnets) cruised past at 'caravan' speed. Everybody takes it easy down that part of the world.
By the time you manage to cross the river, you find out that most of the people on the caravan site were the same. Even the dogs were chilled out. They'd waited so long to get over the ferry, that whatever they had been in a rush about had become seemingly unimportant. Everybody was on holiday. Everybody was living life at caravan-speed. Which, looking back, was really so very simply; especially with so much Whiskey and beer so close at hand.
Posted by Jacqui at June 1, 2004 04:00 PM
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