Our old 1996 caravan was perfect for us, we had made a few modifications to get her exactly how we wanted, and we spent an average of about 70 nights a year in he. We loved her, She was our haven away from the "real" world and were most happy when loading her up and heading away for a weekend, or longer. She was all the more special to us, as we got her as our wedding gift to each other, when we got married 8 years ago.
In the last couple of years, when odd things have needed work, ie when the heating system packed up, and we discovered how much it would cost to get it fixed, or when we realised the floor had de-laminated, we talked about changing her, but every time we did and went to look at a few vans, we could never find any caravan that were anywhere near as good as she was, even most of the ones out of our price range, were still not what we wanted. Luckily, being fairly good at the DIY, I found how to fix the heating controller for the cost of a 97p transistor, and a £5 motor, and I purchased the resin, became a driller killer, and re did the whole floor, with great results, although I do have to say, that paying someone else to fix de-lamination is well worth the money, no mater how much they charge! LOL
As most of you may have read, unfortunately, our love affair was unfairly cut off in it's prime, when our caravan was written off by a person who could not see it slowing down, despite being bright white, and having 3 massive brake lights on the back.They managed to hit the back of it so hard, they caused huge amounts of damage to the caravan, and also our T2 as well.
Now our hand was forced, we set to work again looking round for a replacement, only this time, we had no fall back, so had to find something. We decided to take this opportunity, to add some funds to the kitty, so we could go for something newer, but we were still struggling to find anything that was within our budget, and ticked all the boxes we needed. To make things worse, we have not even seen a single one of our old van, in the same layout for sale anywhere, so we did not even have that as a fall back option.
So after 5 weeks, of looking, and travelling over 1000 miles looking at caravans in various dealers, and seeing some real heaps that were in worse condition than the current state of our written off van, we decided we would have to go private, but how to buy privately, when you have no idea what you want.
We spent most evenings, wading through listings on every caravan web site we could find, and then if we found one that looked possible, we searched on that model to find as many pictures and reviews as we could... So today, after finally finding what looked like the perfect van earlier in the week, we drove 170 miles to actually look at it in the flesh, and fell in love again..
We have brought her home with us, in all this wind and rain, driving through floods, mud, roadworks, and huge traffic jams, and she followed along as good as gold, not even a twitch, even when we saw arctics getting blown across the lanes by the gusts. I never thought the day would come, but we have jumped off the UK marques, and gone for something completely unknown to us, a 2006 Adria Adora 532DL.I can't wait to go out and have a play now... Yippeee...
