Our first proper touring trip away in our Knaus Sports Traveller was bookended with frustrations. The bit in the middle was fantastic – sunny days on the beaches of West Wales, reading in the shade of the awning, long evenings of playing on the campsite - all of your usual
camping blog details. Being towed out of the mud on our first morning (please see
Tales of a Newbie Tourer Part 2 for the embarrassing details) was less satisfactory but the journey home was
definitely worst still. Again, lessons were learned…when are they ever not?!
In hindsight, we realised that it is good for newbie motorhome owners to do the following before setting out on their inaugural camping trip:
1. Locate your spare tyre.
2. Make sure that you can remove your spare tyre.
3. Practice changing a tyre on your ‘van.
And, for those of you reading this thinking, “Really? Surely that’s just being over-careful? It seems an awful lot of effort to go to on the off-chance of things going wrong,” let me just say this: it might seem highly unlikely that you will get a puncture the first time you venture out more than 20 miles from home in your ‘van, but it happens… in fact it happened to us, and on a Bank Holiday Monday too, when all manner of foreseeable problems for caravanners and motorhomers were occurring across the length of the breadth of our dear nation, effectively tying up all available rescue services for more than four long, hot and dusty hours.
It was on the last day of our Easter weekend in Pembrokeshire that we noticed that on a left hand turn, there was a perceptible ‘knocking’ noise under the van located towards the back. Hmmm. Worst-case-scenarios quickly flooded my over-cautious consciousness and, once again, I reached for my phone in an attempt to get an on-line diagnosis of the problem – or several. Yikes – it could be a drive shaft about to go… the suspension of the ‘van could be completely shot… it could be dangerous to drive. As usual I was plumbed into the internet feverishly researching the grim possibilities and relaying them at top volume to my husband in the drivers seat...helpful, I know.
It was at about this point, whilst travelling back along the M48 at 60mph in heavy traffic that the cause of the knocking made itself apparent. There was a loud ‘pop’ and a clang, followed by a brief moment of panic (all mine) before my husband calmly pulled us into a fortuitously placed lay-by at the side of the dual carriageway. We had a puncture… in fact the knocking noise had clearly been caused by an ‘egg’ from our new but faulty tyre which had popped out of the rim on the inner side of the rear left wheel, rubbing the arch as the tyre rotated… this was of course exacerbated during left hand turns and, eventually, we’d had a blow out.
My husband got out of the passenger door (the driver’s door being rather too close to the hurtling coaches, juggernauts and tankers beetling their way across Wales) and proceeded to remove the offending wheel. It was then that the implications of the task of laying hands on the spare became apparent. The spare tyre on a Knaus is located in the middle of the van – a full body’s length from either the back or the side of the van. Lying in the road wasn’t an option…every time a lorry passed us on the road, the ‘van shook and swayed which served to make the jack supplied with the ‘van seem suddenly far more spindly and weak than it had before. When my other half did inch himself under the ‘van to release the spare, we discovered that it was rusted hard in place…it was clear that the bolts holding it were not going to be moving under the power of elbow grease alone.
And so began a long, long…long wait.
As breakdown experiences go, though, there’s a great deal to be said for breaking down in a vehicle with a fridge full of food, half a tank of drinking water, with with tea and coffee on hand and a flushing loo on board. We were a lot more comfortable than the poor souls in the cars regularly over-heating and pulling into the lay-by behind us…we even had a few litres of water to spare for one family’s burst water pipe…
