Monday 1st August: Conniston water

We packed the caravan and left the Maples (a little later than planned) and then drove to Somersham on Friday afternoon. The car seemed to cope with the load reasonably well, but we had very slow traffic so it took us ages to get there. Saturday was a nice lazy day - beautiful sunshine, and very relaxing - just what we needed after our late nights over the last few days.

We left Lawn Cottage at 8.30 on Sunday morning, and after a brief false start (Dad had to drive to catch us up and deliver the things we'd left behind!) we got properly underway. There was virtually no traffic and we were cruising along fine - I stuck the car on cruise control at 58mph and it went really well for about 150 miles.

Then disaster struck - we had a caravan tyre blow out on the motorway. The first we knew of it was that the caravan began to snake (weave) which got worse and worse very rapidly - I couldn't control it  - it finally jacknifed across three lanes of traffic. Miraculously no one hit us - all traffic stopped - and the van didn't flip, although it did swing round and hit the car, damaging the front of the van and the wheel arch of the car. No one was hurt, thank goodness. We got the car and caravan on to the hard shoulder, and with some help I managed to change the wheel (it didn't help that the jack from the car buckled and collapsed, and the wheel brace wasn't long enough to give me the leverage to undo the wheel nuts! Then we moved off the motorway slowly and waited for the recovery guy - he checked everything over, made a quick running repair of the damage to the front of the caravan with gaffer tape (looks charming!) and sent us on our way. We finally arrived at the campsite in Conniston at about 6pm,  about 4 hours later than planned. We'll get the damage looked at today, replace the damaged wheel and tyres, and hopefully chalk this one up to experience! It really could have been a great deal worse!

After a couple of medincinal doses of Grandpa David's plum wine and a lovely maiden dinner cooked by Frances in the caravan we hit the hay early and slept like logs!
We've woken to a rainy day - good day for sorting things out!

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