gift list – Campervantures

Another inspiration from my reading over at Junkaholique was the thought of using vintage suitcases in the camper for clothes and bits on the back shelf.

With this in mind, I got in touch with lovely Sarah from Vintage Retro Kitsch to see if she had anything suitable. We popped over on a Sunday afternoon to look at the wide array of cases she had stashed away, and came away with this one:

(Apologies for the frankly awful picture quality, but we came home to discover that after a power cut caused by the thawing of the snow, we had an electricity “brownout” (reduced voltage) for nearly a week, so the lighting wasn’t great in the evenings, and during daylight we were both working hard to pay for Ruby!)

It was very tempting to buy two, as this one is navy blue (believe it or not) and Sarah had another similar one in brown, but we wanted to check on how it would fit on the shelf first. Having put it in the van yesterday (and completely neglected to take a photograph. It was dark by that time anyway!) there is room for a second without stacking them, as this would call for fitting jail bars ASAP, but to be honest, I’m not sure if we need another. We have got a lot of cupboard space. But also a lot of camping stuff that I completely forgot to pack away yesterday.

What we need is a nice warm weekend where we can experiment with taking things in and out of cupboards and working out what belongs where. It needs to be warm, as I’m more inclined to look for proper storage solutions when I can feel my fingers and toes!

The next three weekends are fairly stacked up in terms of other commitments (if you can call going on your own hen do a commitment!) which means any van stuff we do will be, well, without the van! We have the old curtains here, having given them a good wash, but they have seen better days and I intend on replacing them with some made from lovely fabric from Fabric Rehab, Fabric Inspirations or Spoonflower, along with matching tablecloths and bolster cushion covers. I may need to enlist the help of Rooobarb’s mum though, and that would entail telling her that we’ve bought the van…

We also need to spend some money – a cover from Just Kampers is on the shopping list, as are some fairy lights (essential, obviously), a leisure battery charger, a spare set of keys need cutting, and at some point we’re going to need to replace the quarterlight window seals and handles. Which then makes us look at the door handles and the grab handle in the cab and wonder if they’d look better in chrome to match the handles on the quarterlights. Yeah, I can see how this gets expensive!

I was not paid to plug anything here. I’m just posting about things I like. All opinions are my own.

Greetings and salutations, welcome to our camper! Grab a seat in the back, kettle’s on. My name is Custard (obviously not my real name) and yon blokey behind the wheel there is Rooobarb (again, not what his mother calls him).

Let me tell you a story:

In 2011, Rooobarb and I went to see a show by Laura Mugridge called Running on Air. The show had been brought to the North West by our friends at Spot On Rural Touring, who have never given us a duff show yet, so when they mentioned a one woman show with an audience of five that takes place in the back of a campervan, we were in!

We drove to Mawdsley, and met the stars of the show; Laura, and her lovely orange bay window camper called Joni. The show was wonderful, a life-affirming journey around the UK with laughs and tears, all whilst sitting in the back of Joni outside a farm shop. Laura sparked an idea in our heads; when her and her husband Tom had got married, they had asked people to choose a part of a campervan to buy, and when they got a camper, they would name the parts after the people who bought them. I was sitting on a bench seat who was an uncle. You get the picture.

We thought that this was a marvellous idea, and so, when in October 2012 we decided that a 15 year long engagement was probably long enough, and that we should do something about it, we shamelessly stole the idea for our wedding gift list:

We get married in 9 weeks time, and already have been pledged three rear view mirrors, one wing mirror, a fuel gauge, a fire extinguisher, a gearbox and a radiator (which could be interesting in an air-cooled engine, I blame a tired Custard googling for lists of car parts for gift lists late at night…). The lovely Rob and Sue at Spot On have also promised us an unused camping toilet. Which will make an interesting focal piece on the gift table at the reception!

So that was the start of our campervan adventures, and in the future we’re hoping to go wherever our flat-four engine will take us.