Time to Face The Music

alt80

Yeah I’m not loving the electric car thing tbh haha even if I am technically falling into the early adopter category lol. 

Rabbit casserole sounds good.

Imagine you make a lot of savings on hol with being able to take your own food?

RelievedSheff

alt80 said:

Yeah I’m not loving the electric car thing tbh haha even if I am technically falling into the early adopter category lol. 

Rabbit casserole sounds good.

Imagine you make a lot of savings on hol with being able to take your own food?

It is the first "proper" holiday we will have had with the van but we have found on our weekends away that it is a cheap way of getting away depending where you go. Some weekends we have spent very little at all. Others if we have been to the pub we have spent a bit more.

I think with what we have planned out for the week we will have a mixture of quite spendy days and some days where we spend nothing at all. Having the big fridge freezer is a help. We can take pretty much a full weeks food with us.

I don't think it will end up being an expensive holiday really. We plan to do a lot of walking and we have a mixture of paid official sites and free parking places sorted out throughout the week.

We are using this coming weeks holiday as a bit of a tester holiday really for our longer two week Scottish trip towards the end of the year at the beginning of October. This weeks break should give us an idea of how well set up we are and if we have anything that we need to sort out or modify before we head North of the border.

milann

The plans for the holidays sound great. We want to do Scotland in ours either this year or next 👍

RelievedSheff

milann said:

The plans for the holidays sound great. We want to do Scotland in ours either this year or next 👍

We are doing it the last week in September first week in October when the kids have gone back to school and the midges have done for the year.

I suspect we will use a fair amount of gas on that trip for the heating  

We are not really planning that one as such. We are just going to drive and see where we end up. The only plan we have is to see the other half's mum on the first night we are up there so we will spend the night at Irvine which is only just up the road from them.

alt80

Thought of you and your van when we went to York we spent £450 on hotel accomm for the 2 nights inc breakfast and room upgrade. Hotel wasn’t exactly amazing but how often you go away will soon rack up 100 weekend trips to pay for the van. 

Scotland trip sounds good and should be a good time to go. I’d love to do a tour up there. Good roads and I like my single malts so wouldn’t mind visiting some of the speyside distilleries. Don’t know if I suggested before but if you got a trailer for the Sierra you could take that park the van up and get out in your car - enjoy the roads and the car will get some use that way? 

RelievedSheff

alt80 said:

Thought of you and your van when we went to York we spent £450 on hotel accomm for the 2 nights inc breakfast and room upgrade. Hotel wasn’t exactly amazing but how often you go away will soon rack up 100 weekend trips to pay for the van. 

Scotland trip sounds good and should be a good time to go. I’d love to do a tour up there. Good roads and I like my single malts so wouldn’t mind visiting some of the speyside distilleries. Don’t know if I suggested before but if you got a trailer for the Sierra you could take that park the van up and get out in your car - enjoy the roads and the car will get some use that way? 

I can't drive it if we put a trailer on it and the car. My licence only goes up to 3500kg and the van is pretty much that on it's own!

Would be a nightmare on the Highland roads with a trailer on the back as well.

That's how we view it that the van will pay for itself in time with weekends away and holidays and at the end of the 5 years finance agreement it will still be worth a decent chunk of money. They don't depreciate like a car does. 

joedenise

alt80 said:

Thought of you and your van when we went to York we spent £450 on hotel accomm for the 2 nights inc breakfast and room upgrade. Hotel wasn’t exactly amazing but how often you go away will soon rack up 100 weekend trips to pay for the van. 

Scotland trip sounds good and should be a good time to go. I’d love to do a tour up there. Good roads and I like my single malts so wouldn’t mind visiting some of the speyside distilleries. Don’t know if I suggested before but if you got a trailer for the Sierra you could take that park the van up and get out in your car - enjoy the roads and the car will get some use that way? 

@alt80 - that sounds like reverse caravanning to me!  If you need a car then a caravan would be the way to go.  With a motorhome it's shank's pony, bikes or scooter to get around!

@RelievedSheff - as you've done several weekends away now I would think that you have sussed out the best way of using the van and if there is anything you could add or take away to make life easier.  For me the worst thing with going away for a longer holiday is having to change the bed!  The longest we've do in this country is just over 2 weeks so have enough bedding to not worry about washing it until we get home but when we go abroad we usually go for at least a month at a time so as we only have 2 sets of bedding we end up having to wash it so that we can change it each week.

alt80

You can do a test for it mate - one of my younger staff is into horses - signed up recently it’s a couple of days: some reversing around a yard with a trailer, hooking it up and a drive out round the roads. Can’t see it being hard unless you’re !!!!!! at parking lol.

alt80

@joedenise haha true I actually forgot those things even existed lol. Idk think the last of my brain cells left me in about 2018. 🙄

RelievedSheff

alt80 said:

You can do a test for it mate - one of my younger staff is into horses - signed up recently it’s a couple of days: some reversing around a yard with a trailer, hooking it up and a drive out round the roads. Can’t see it being hard unless you’re !!!!!! at parking lol.

We have considered me doing a test so that we can uprate the van and get a bigger payload. But have decided now (I think) that we probably won't bother. We can uprate the van to 4100kg without any modifications to the van, any higher and the suspension has the be changed.

We just need to watch that we keep within our 520kg payload at the minute because if we do get pulled over and weighed I will be in bother if we are over weight. Not so bad for the other half because he can legally drive over 3500kg so he would just get a telling off for being over weight. I would be in breach of my licence conditions which is a bit worse!!