Another fine, dry day, but time to move on. We had considered visiting the Lake District, but the need to get to Edinburgh in Scotland for the following Thursday, and the likelihood of sites being booked up with it being the weekend meant that we pushed on into Scotland along the M6 and then the A74(M).

We picked Moffat as a likely place to stop and headed there. The better of the two sites there was fully booked so we settled for another nearby. The pitch area for campervans wasn’t particularly welcoming but we managed to get an electrical hookup sorted out. As we were settling down for a barbecue dinner, a large “safari bus” of young Germans pulled up and parked a few yards away. The travellers all piled out picked their bags up from lockers under the bus. I guessed that they’d all have tents and would walk further onto the site to pitch them but no, the bus driver went up a ladder on to the top of the bus and after a bit of jiggery-pokery, a tent-like canvas construction pulled up on the top of the bus and everyone climbed up there to sleep. Useful for keeping the wildlife at bay when on a real safari, but it’s unlikely that they’d be attacked by wild haggis in Scotland!

I walked into High Bentham early on Thursday morning to get a newspaper (no radio signal again…). It was quite a walk, much further than I’d remembered from the previous day, but after about 40 minutes I got back to the van, only to find that a few minutes after I’d left a van had been round offering milk and newspapers for sale.

After a leisurely breakfast, we decided that we really should make use of the bikes which we’d been lugging round everywhere (and which we’d only used briefly, in Cornwall and Glastonbury). The site owner suggested a route and we set off. I suspect that the site owner had never attempted the route on a bike, as it started off with a very long, steep hill which we ended up walking part of. The sunny day made it quite hard going, but it was still a pleasant route. After cycling round, up and and down lots of hills we made it back to High Bentham and retired to the local pub for a couple of beers, before going a bit of grocery shopping and whizzing down the hill back to the site for a good night’s rest.

Needing to push on up the country, we set off relatively early and made rapid progress up the A49 and then on to the M6. Checking through our campsite books, we found a likely site at High Bentham, near Lancaster (though actually in Yorkshire!) again called “Riverside”. We had a hard-standing pitch close to the toilet block, but due to the amount of rain that had been falling, the grass adjacent to the pitch was waterlogged so we had to do a bit of manoeuvring in order to find somewhere dry to put the awning up. The rain had stopped and it was looking brighter so we decided to stay for two nights.

Leaving the site relatively early in quite a downpour, we had to stop after a mile or so when the van overheated. Further inspection showed that this was due to the drive-belt breaking. T25’s don’t have a “fan belt” as such, as the fan is at the front and the engine is at the back. The drive-belt powers the alternator and the water-pump. We pulled up at a local beauty spot and moved all the kit from the boot of the van into the main body (as the engine compartment is accessed through a hatch in the boot).

Fortunately we had a spare drive-belt, but I found that fitting it wasn’t as simple as the manual would have you believe. A very kind chap who was out walking his dog gave me a hand and by using the old belt to pull the new one we managed to get it fitted. The whole process took a couple of hours though, delaying the journey significantly.

As a result, we decided to travel only as far as Shrewsbury. On reaching the town, we headed for the supermarket to restock on food, and to the local Halfords to replace the drive-belt. We phoned ahead to Beaconsfield Farm Caravan Park to check what time they were open until. They said they closed at 7pm and at 6:30 we were still shopping. As we came to the checkout, there was a slight power blip, causing the lights to dim. It also caused all of the checkouts to reboot. (For those of a nerdy persuasion, the tills were using an AMI BIOS and running Windows 2000 Professional). Fortunately, as each till came back online, they recovered their session so that none of the shopping had to be re-scanned. The delay made it unlikely that we’d get to the site for 7pm, so we called again and they agreed to hold on until 7:15.

We made it with a minute or so to spare. The site uses a barrier with a passcode so once reception is closed, no new arrivals can get onto the site. The site also had a restaurant and swimming pool, though we didn’t make use of either facility. The rain continued to pour down, with some still coming through the sky-light in the van. We managed to stay dry by getting up every now and then and wringing out the Jeyes cloths which were soaking up the leak.

We’d had a very relaxing time in Glastonbury, but on Monday 2nd August we recommenced our journey northward. Having set off quite late from Glastonbury we decided that we wouldn’t be getting very far that day and so aimed for Great Malvern.

Having driven around the town briefly we drove up to a nearby campsite, Riverside at Little Clevelode. After dinner, we walked down to the river which runs through one end of the site and watched the water run by. Returning to the van, the weather turned once more and it started to rain, continuing through the night and into the next morning.

On Friday 30th July we picked up the van, with newly-fitted clutch and decided to push on as far as we felt able. The unscheduled stay in Barnstaple had put our plans back a few days and we needed to start heading towards Scotland. The van performed well and a little while later we left Devon and arrived at Glastonbury in Somerset, not a great distance from the site of the festival we had visited a little over a month earlier. The Isle of Avalon campsite was our home for the next three nights, and we went up to the top of the Glastonbury Tor to watch the sun go down on the Sunday evening. The Glastonbury Abbey Festival was on that weekend, so we heard bits of Van Morrison on the Friday and saw a glimpse of Jools Holland on the Sunday. Saturday’s performance was by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who we saw rehearsing while we were visiting the Abbey on Saturday afternoon, and we were able to enjoy much of the accompanying fireworks display from the campsite later that night.

We stayed at Big Meadow for an extra day, finally leaving on Tuesday 27th July. After popping in to the VW dealer in Barnstaple to pick up a replacement relay, we headed up to the North Devon coast, across Exmoor, aiming for Lynton. As we came off the moor and turned for Lynton, we came across an incredibly tight corner heading up a hill. The van struggled to get round the corner and up the hill, but we thought we’d made it and were climbing up the subsequent slope as I noticed that the clutch wasn’t working properly. A nasty burning smell confirmed that the clutch had gone getting up and round the corner. Stuck halfway up the hill, with no forward traction and no mobile phone signal was a less than an ideal situation. Fortunately, several kind people stopped and offered help including a couple of young blokes in a Range Rover. They towed us to the top of the hill where we were able to call the RAC again. The RAC send a recovery vehicle and suggested that they recover us as far as the local garage at Lynton. As we couldn’t make it to a campsite, and with the clutch working a little, we found a quiet car park by a local football pitch and after a couple of drinks and a meal in Lynton, bedded down for the night.

The next morning we crawled up to the garage in Lynton only to find that they were too busy to be able to perform the repair for at least a week. Calling the RAC again resulted in them agreeing to perform a second recovery, as they had suggested the first garage themselves. The same guy turned up as the previous day, and we took the van to the VW garage in Barnstaple which we’d visited only the previous day.

Without the van, we had nowhere to sleep, so booked a couple of nights in the Royal & Fortescue Hotel in the centre of Barnstaple. Proper beds and a shower that you don’t you don’t have to feed with 20p coins or keep pressing a button for!

We spent a couple of days looking round Barnstaple, going to see Shrek 2 at the cinema (we needed a laugh at this point) and walking part of the Tarka Trail along the coast to Instow.

22nd July saw us make the journey out of Cornwall and into Devon, to the Hidden Valley site near Braunton. Another very professionally operated site in, as you would guess, a valley. Valleys and seaside hillsides seem to be a favoured location for campsites, with one major drawback being that TV and radio reception is pretty much non-existant. Without these, and if getting to a newsagents is awkward, you can start to feel a little bit cut off from the outside world.

We weren’t able to extend our stay at Hidden Valley, due to it being booked up with families for the weekend, so we set off towards Ilfracombe in search of another site for Saturday and Sunday. After various fruitless visits, we found the Big Meadow site near Ilfracombe and booked in for a couple of nights.

On our way to the site, I noticed that the indicator light was half-lit on the dashboard, so we stopped and found that neither the indicators nor the hazard lights were working. We found a safe yard to stop in and called the RAC. While waiting for them to turn up, I found that the indicator relay was showing signs of scorching, and that the fuses to the indicator and hazard lights had blown.

On arrival the RAC man, who was very friendly, changed the fuses only for them to immediately blow again on testing. Further investigation revealed that the tow bar electrical cable hadn’t been secured properly by whoever fitted it. As a result it had been resting on the exhaust pipe and had melted through and shorted out. A bit of insulating tape and a cable tie and that was sorted. We changed the fuses again and everything was working (though the burnt relay would need replacing). After several hours delay we finally made it to Big Meadow for Saturday evening.

Staying at Big Meadow was an experience. The site is run by a lovely couple who are very welcoming and there are lots of activities planned to keep kids amused. Unfortunately, the older teenagers on the site decided to amuse themselves on the Saturday night by running around shouting and generally causing a disturbance. It got so bad that the site owner came out and gave them a severe telling-off, which seemed to do the trick and things were much quieter after that.

On the 19th July we moved up the coast to Padstow, staying at a site close to the town, and a short cycle ride from Rick Stein’s various seafood establishments in the area. Being on a budget, and not having pre-booked several months before we opted for the Rick Stein Fish & Chip shop. Having placed our order we had to wait 30 minutes for the food to turn up, and frankly, we weren’t terribly impressed by fish & chips and squid & chips coming in at over £14 takeaway!

The rain came down again and made our stay at Camelford on the next day, rather uneventful, if a little damp.

Bude was our next destination, the Wooda campsite in particular. Very nice, well-managed site, perhaps even a little too professional! We only stayed there for one night, but enjoyed walking round Bude, and we did consider returning to the site a few days later. By this stage, the schools had broken up and a lot of the campsites were filling up with families and their children.

I stopped updating this log for a while as we hadn’t seen sight nor sound of an internet cafe. So, from here on in it may be a bit sparse in places.

We stayed for 3 nights at the first site near St Just-in-Penwith, in Kelynack, and then another 2 nights at another site in Botallack, the other side of St Just. While there we spend a day over at Merazion, close to St Michael’s Mount, though we didn’t venture over to the island, as the causeway was underwater and we didn’t fancy the boat trip. That was a warm, if not sunny, day unlike most of the others in St Just which were quite misty and wet.

On one of the other reasonable days we drove to St Ives. Our main reason for going was to visit the Tate St Ives gallery. We parked just around the corner and wandered round the gallery. Some odd exhibits (for example, a video of a man wandering about in a windy desert telling jokes) and some very interesting. The main exhibition on at the time was a series of John Nash works. The most interesting of these was called simply Boulder. We watched the video which explains how Nash carved a boulder out of a block of wood and dumped it in a local stream in Wales. He then tracked its movements as it was pushed downstream by floods and spring water, taking still photos of moving footage every now and then. Over a period of 25 years the boulder moved down into a river and then into an estuary before finally disappearing in 2003. It just struck me as a great idea and the film of just the boulder at various parts of its journey along with a caption giving the date of the clip was very effective.

Next stop on the journey was due to be St Agnes, but it was pouring with rain when we arrived, and after a brief walk around we decided to head straight up to the Higher Moor campsite near Newquay. This was quiet site with no advertising but a good one, close to Porth Joke and a few other bays. We stayed for a few days, cycling down to the bay and sitting enjoying the occasionally good weather. We visited Newquay for one morning which was probably enough, and spent an afternoon catching up with the washing in a laundrette in St Columb Major. During our time at Higher Moor, we got the awning out and found it gave us quite a bit more room for storage, making the whole process of getting the bed out considerably less painful.