Airstream Camping 2025 - We Start Again

Our first trip of the year in Towed Haul and an auspicious start it may turn out to be.

When cleaning her out, I discovered a soft spot or two in the floor, just by the couch by the door. A gentle press with my fingers resulted in a muted rustling sound beneath the vinyl floor covering, and a definite dip. The dreaded rotten floor, caused by some unseen leak of water under the vinyl. Repairing that is a major task and I don't think we have will, or the money, to fix it. Maybe we'll call this our last season and sell the old girl on as a project for someone else. It's a bit annoying because it's all happened unseen, and therefore we've done nothing about it. Interestingly, the noise from the floor is giving off dry vibes, but maybe I'll check it again after some rain. Who knows?

Back to this trip, and it's the usual three-nighter at Site 16 at Rondeau Provincial Park. Almost as soon as we'd hauled the old girl out of storage, we legged it to the UK for a month, so my first job in returning to Canada was to clean her up, inside and out, check everything was working, and sanitize the fresh water system. To my surprise, the good people at CanAm RV had filled the fresh water tank, so after draining it, refilling it and adding a little bleach, I had quite a bit of stinky water to clear out of the internal water lines. CanAm had cleared the anti-freeze, but water in the lines, sat there for a month, needed to go. It's worth pointing out that we don't drink the water from the fresh water tank and lines, we always bring fresh in another container for that, but no one wants to shower or wash their dishes in stinky water. The bleach (3/4 cup for 45 gallons), by the way, works well, but you do have to flush it through properly.

When we loaded up and prepped for travel, the weather was being silly. Temperatures around 36-37C and blazing sunshine, plus some humidity, and I was wet through with sweat. The onboard fridge and freezer was complaining as well, struggling to keep cold. But, being the troopers that we are, we hitched up, checked the lights and brakes and hit the open road. Well, we had to inch past the badly parked cars fifty yards from our driveway first, but then we hit the open road.

Our hitch receiver on the Toadmobile is rusty, the result of thirteen Canadian winters. I fret that it will break as we're towing, and perhaps I should have had it replaced. But, it's been modified by CanAm RV and is pretty sturdy. When we hitch up we use the Airstream's jack to lift the car, and I reason that if it's going to break, it'll do it then. Today it was all good.

It was hot driving towards Lake Erie, and windy, too. The gas mileage was moderate, but you could tell that the wind was coming into play. But the Toadmobile took it all in its stride and in no time we were wheeling into the park and making our way to our personal site. It's not really our personal site of course, but it feels like it.

Setting up was another sweat-inducing chore, although the temperatures were seven or eight degrees down because we were on the lake front. Site 16 also allows us to set up in the shade, which was helpful. The forecast was for thunderstorms, and the sun was in and out of the clouds. There was a few spots of rain, then a short shower, and the occasional rumble of thunder, but that was all. The sun came out and the temperatures went back up, and everything was summery again. 

Someone came by and stopped at the site opposite and expressed amazement that it was still dry in the park. She had been caught in a storm just a couple of miles away, and yet we knew nothing about it. It's a good job that thunderstorms are so localized.

Of course when it gets hot, we have to power up the cold air in the Airstream. It's good to have, essential actually, but it's noisy. DW, though, did a fine job tuning it so that it was come on and go off at reasonable intervals, which is what we needed if we were to get any sleep.

The afternoon was hot and we did very little, apart from drive out to the convenience store just outside the park's gate and stock up with beer and nibbles. Then we went back to the store to exchange one of the boxes of cookies we'd bought for a non-dairy type. Gawd, pick up the wrong ones. 

Barn Swallow

Tree Swallow

As the evening set in we enjoyed some of DW's homemade vegan stew (which is really very good), before setting off on a short walk to have a look at Rondeau Bay. The little park store was closed up for the night, but the Barn Swallows that live there were busy, as were the Purple Martins and the Tree Swallows. We watched a pair of Tree Swallows feeding their young in a nesting box that had been installed by the park rangers. At first we stood too close, which made the male fly around us in wide circles, and the female sit and wait. We took just a few steps further back and then the feeding commenced, with the female flying off to get insects, and the male sat atop the nesting box, on guard. There were a ton of other birds around as well, as our Merlin bird call app registered around ten other species of birds, just from their calls. This is why we love coming to Rondeau.

It's not yet school summer holiday time yet, so the campground is occupied most by old geezers like us. It was very quiet last night, and I think many had turned in for the night by 10pm. We campers are pure rock and roll. How we will sleep with the "air" on I don't know, but hopefully it will seem like background noise. Still no thunderstorms, but I put the awning away, just in case.

Blighty 2025 - Some British Reflections

Almost a month in the UK, and while family dominated, we did get around a bit. Here are a few observations on the trip.

England is a busy place. We arrived on the Friday that the school's half-term holiday started, and the M25, London's orbital motorway, was jammed solid at noon. Fortunately my local knowledge allowed us to take the scenic route to our accommodation in Oxfordshire. I was then forcibly reacquainted with the narrowness of the roads, the ones with no shoulder, but with hedges, trees and assorted greenery growing right up to the road's edge. Add the readjustment required to drive a stick-shift car again after a long lay off, and it was a challenging trip. A tip for would be visitors to the UK from Canada; make sure you get a small rental car. You'll find out why soon enough.

We were staying in the central England area known as the Cotswolds. Pretty, charming and very, very monied. The clear choice of cars for the people now living there is the Range Rover or the Land Rover. Wealthy Londoners out in the country, imagining that they really do need a four-wheel-drive monster just because they have to drive past fields on the asphalted roads. Goodness how those Chelsea tractors came unstuck on the single-track roads that link some of the villages. There is an almost constant traffic jam in the pretty town of Burford, and it's not an exaggeration to to say that 25% of the cars in the line ups were of the Rover SUV type. Numpties.

Never, ever, visit Bourton-on-the-Water on a bank holiday.

English grocery stores are a trial. They're small but have twice as many people in them as those at home. The people shopping in them all know what they want and rush around, and that makes browsing in an unfamiliar shop all the more difficult. Most of the big stores operate loyalty cards, and offer lower prices to the holders of such cards. Sadly, people not resident in the UK can't have a card, so we were reduced to asking other people at the checkout if we could borrow theirs. It's all to the good because they get the points, while we get the discount, but it's still a pain having to ask. We half cracked it by getting my nephew's girlfriend to send us a screenshot of her card, but she only had the Sainsbury's Nectar Card and not the Tesco Clubcard - see, only half cracked it.

Parking anywhere other than big grocery stores and it costs an arm and leg to leave your car in a parking lot. £8 here, £7.50 there, it all mounts up. I reckon we paid out hundreds of GBP. To add insult to injury, I was accused of not paying at Charlbury Station, although my credit card says otherwise. The fine is £100, but I'm not paying it. I did have to pay the car rental company an admin charge of £40 for handling the paperwork, as agreed in the contract, but I'll try to get that back from the parking people as well. I haven't heard from the same parking company about overstaying on a paid parking ticket at Didcot Parkway train station. I'm not sure, but I may have underpaid, possibly because I misunderstood the instructions on the machine. If they get me for that then I'll pay. At least nearly all of the paid parking was done with a contactless card this time; nowhere forced a phone app on me.

I may have picked a speeding fine, too. Speed limits are strictly policed in the UK, and as I was coming out of Stow-on-the-Wold doing perhaps 35mph in the 30mph zone, when I noticed I was driving straight at a camera van. I slowed quickly and may not have triggered the camera at all, but you never know. I'd been particularly careful about not speeding, so if I do get a fine then I'll be royally pissed.

When you pay for gas in the UK, you nearly always have to go into the little shop, there being no "pay at the pump" option. The UK is no slouch when it comes to retail technology, it was years ahead of Canada with Chip and Pin, and contactless, but this gas pump thing was a mystery. Or was it? The little shops are actually convenience stores that sell everything from coffee, to newspapers, to bread, to lightbulbs. If you pay at the pump then you don't go into the shop and you don't get tempted by that discount bag of Wine Gums. Going into the shop to pay is clearly a ruse to get you to spend more money. Don't fall for it!

Talking of gas, when people in Canada say they are the most highly taxed nation in the world, they're wrong. Additional UK taxes make gas there about 70% more expensive than in Canada. Another reason to get a small rental car.

In the UK, people don't generally tip wait staff. Most Point of Sale terminals don't include a tipping facility, and most servers look quite surprised when you do offer them a tip. While a goodly proportion of establishments take only card payments these days, if you wish to tip, have a bit of cash handy. British wait staff, while surprised, will always be happy to accept any reward for good service. Some places will make a mandatory service charge for large parties, but they're rare.

This may be a well worn bit of advice, but in British pubs, whether you stand at the bar or sit at a table, you have to order your drinks at the bar and take them to wherever you're sitting or standing. No one will come to your table to take your order. Things are changing a bit, and there's a bit of crossover between restaurants and pubs. If you're in any doubt, order at the bar. People still like to queue in the UK, that is stand in line and wait for their turn. If you're at the bar, don't jump the queue, even if there isn't an obvious queue. There are only a few things worse than jumping a queue in Britain; no, scratch that, there is NOTHING worse than jumping a queue.

Public transport is pretty good in the UK, with trains and buses being fast, frequent and generally affordable. Big cities like London are bringing all their transport providers under a single authority and controlling prices and services, which makes for excellent fares. The UK's trains are good across the country, even with the alarming rise of cancelled trains, often with no notice. The fares are labyrinthine, but if you research and you travel outside of the morning and evening rush, then it's all quite reasonable. We were paying £19 for a day return from Didcot to London, which for an hour's trip on fast train is pretty good. If you're young or old, you can get special discount cards, as well. Kids under 5 travel free on trains, and in London kids under 12 travel free on all buses, trains and underground, which we took advantage of extensively.

There are a lot of cars in the UK, and on certain days and at certain times it can seem like they're all out on the roads at the same time. It takes very little to gum up the road system, and it can be something as simple as a some traffic lights not phased properly, as we found out in Weymouth on a Friday afternoon. It's a fairly small seaside town, but it was gridlocked, all because there were three sets of traffic lights quite close together, but their phasing was out of wack.

I was reminded once again that the drivers in England are usually a very cooperative bunch. They'll let you out onto a busy road, yield when they don't have to, and generally don't behave like entitled dicks. Because speed limits are enforced, you don't get tailgaters, not often anyway, trying to push slower cars onwards, and you don't hear too much grumbling when people are running at below the speed limit. Not everyone plays the game, of course, but driving in England, even with the heavier traffic, can be a far more pleasant experience than driving in Ontario.

...and that was it, that was Blighty 2025. I'm sure there's a lot more that I could write, but this post is far too long already. It must surely be time to revert to the Airstream Annals.