October travels with Newbie, fast becoming the happy camper

Been here several times, a new travel companion sharing a catch-up mission on the way to completing another issue of my partwork ‘Living’. Two down and two to go is one of those triumphs as I am meeting a deadline: I have been known for being good at missing them!

Anyway, this dew on the grass may be good for gardeners but for us two lads on the latest caravan go-round it’s not the damp grass that Newbie is keen to know about of course. Seeing pet canaries are not so partial to rolling in stuff that’ll ruffle feathers.

So far it’s been a steep learning curve, my navigator in chief taking on the Kookie number of getting the blame when we turn down the wrong road. Newbie is on his first time out, being just over three hundred miles of perch grabbing time “learning on the job” as we get to reaching Wales. We’ve crossed the Pennines, stopping at the Heywood farm Lane End campsite which has deer on the park and reached just five minutes from the M62 junction.

That was a winner of a place for Newbie, who’d got me to turn right, and then right again into a Sycamore Road after the garage and ASDA: I’d need made a quick return there to get the food still sitting in the home fridge 140 miles away. Just shows there may many a slip between cup and lip – and sunny side up eggs on toast for brekka.  This is a campsite with real country feel, yet right on the fast-track for going places, Manchester barely a score of miles away. Mike’s great and has some motohomers who have been revisiting his 5-only site for a couple of nights stay on the way home from a week in the office. Home is ten miles away, Shelly and Dave said.

Come three nights there I opted to move to Delamare Forest for a walk in the woods from a C&CC site which has a train line just a pathway from the front gate. Another way to have country and town life in the best way going: you are beside the Mid Cheshire Line which gets you easy into Chester. One caravanner told me they hadn’t touched the car keys for almost a week .. “been all over the place, and the food at the Station restaurant and café is better then being a van-chef.”

From the site is a bit of anything you fancy: to find a place called Plumley !! is different and where music ace Roy once visited the Village shop I heard from Jonathon. You can learn a lot with a bit of chat, can’t you. A Post I put on Facebook got linked that place to a “Clothing for Extremes” conference in The Lakes years back, one which had an Everest connection. Small world hey ! so expect there will be more on this topic right here: in the partwork “Living” too.

In another place, another time, there’s a story to relate of a church of many faces … mellow stone mixed with that distinctive white and wood which I have always though of as true Cheshire. St Oswald’s church in Lower Peover gave me well over an hour of the afternoon on a bright red carpet, amongst a mass of box pews number enough for a crowd of a congregation: with more carved woodwork than you’d see in a shipbuilders. All that in a tree lined countryside with the Peover Eye river running through it.

And now for the stonework: it was an easy dash along the Wales expressway to preface some “check the width” edgy moments getting through an hole hacked through pretty unforgiving rock. Welcome  to Conwy and with the road heading to where we wanted to get narrowing to 3.05m this was something of an experience.

Yet as they say “If you can’t stand the heat then stay out of the kitchen”. We slowed of course, as this bit of freeway is where probably a Sherman tank would come off second best, so what chance a caravan if you bumped the sides. We made it!

There was a reason for getting here: the agm of that long running club of sorts called the Outdoor Writers’ and Photographers Guild were in town to do some partying. I’d not been along to one of these shindigs for years but recall when the Spur Books publisher Rob Neillands and Kate Spencer of KSA were chatting with COLA people (a trade association, not a drink!) that perhaps something could be organised to bring two sides of a triangle together. The two worked on the idea and a year later in Harrogate a ball began to roll, there were seven takers with more added in time.

There have been some great events the guys and gals in our fraternity have made memorable – and does anyone recall Clive Tully dropping out of a tree one dark night down near Widdecombe . . it’s a fair chance of course. There are lots of times like that which don’t make the pages but then OWG was like that and still is by the looks. It is on the cards perhaps that at the Motorhome & Caravan Show at nec we’ll stop-off next week (I write this from Cardigan Bay C&CC site, October 7) It’ll be good to see more write-smiley faces … yet who knows, as once Frogmobile is on the other side of the Severn the trail may be a tale turning right. 

We’ll see won’t we, in the meantime the wish is for you to be travelling safe. Thing to watch for is those pinch points as with holes cut through rock were probably you’d have to be careful if you were driving a coach and horses through it. An original idea.