Our second consecutive visit to Camp Quirky. The event was good, although due to our 9:30pm arrival we could not park up in the event on the Friday evening. The earliest we could park up the van was 10:00 on the Saturday morning and we were located in the overflow area. The ground is much rougher here and we really didn’t feel part of the event located down here. Pity really, as otherwise Camp Quirky is well organised and run.
We visited Northumberland for the first time, parking up at Waren Mill campsite. The campsite was very muddy so it was a good opportunity to test our new BF Goodrich KO2 tyres. All went well whilst several vans around us needed towed off the grass. Nevertheless, after the holiday weekend we moved pitch to a hardstanding.
We visited several of the small villages, and castles, along this coastline. There’s lots to do here so we may well return for another trip in the future.
The Holy Island causeway was a chance to try out my DJI mount on the outside of the van. I was worried my camera might fall off. Everything went well though, except I messed up the camera clamp mounting on the way over.
The video captures some of the highlights.
We travelled from the Glasgow area arriving at Stratford race course on the Thursday evening. The area we had booked was already full so we parked up in the overflow area and had a walk around to investigate. This is a huge show with a great variety of campervans and overland vehicles to see.
We raised our usual flags to help us find our van on the way back. although they were dwarfed by some others. The flags also celebrated the Queen’s platinum jubilee on this occasion.
This image doesn’t do the show justice. There were so may vans. The video at the end of this post captures the scale of the show much better. We finished the day with a relaxing campfire.
I do like a timelapse and we watched the sunset. For some reason the video is not embedding, so it can be viewed at this link https://youtu.be/9seOwSDCFcI
It was really nice to meet and chat with more people we watch on YouTube – Greg and Lou Virgoe, Rick and Debs Beechwood, John and Mandy. We met Alex Frood and Liam the Terrible at Quirky a couple of weeks back. It’s good to meet in person having watched these peoples’ van lives for quite some time.
We also started our campervan sticker collection so we just need to decide where to place these on the campervan – and get our own stickers printed of course.
The video captures an overview of the scale of the show – it’s huge. There were some brilliant vans with really fancy paint jobs and some interesting overland vehicles.
On a different topic, we are getting close to finishing the Caddy Maxi conversion in preparation for a family convoy to France. Wendy keeps us right advising we only have two days left over weekends before we depart. You can view the microcamper conversion here.
We had a mad rush after work from the Glasgow area trying to get to Kelmarsh before the gates closed at Camp Quirky at 10pm. Fortunately we made it, parked up for the night and had a walk around to become familiar with everything.
The weather on Saturday was glorious.
You can view the full video of our visit to Camp Quirky here.
This video captures an overview of an overnight Britstop in South Kelvington, Yorkshire then West Runton, the Norfolk Broads, Bakewell and the Metal Bridge Inn Britstop near Carlisle.
We visited a few beaches, flew our drone a few times and captured some of the boating on the Nortfolk Broads.
It is an interesting off road drive down to the CCC site. Wendy didn’t like this drive very much especially after the narrowness of the A149. Fortunately we did not meet anything coming the other way.
We also made short visit to the beach at West Runton.
It is not easy to find parking for campervans at West Runton as most of the car parks have height barriers. The car park at the beach is limited to 2.1 metres so we parked opposite the shops on the main road.
We also made a visit to the beach at Cromer.
We have set off on a wee break and enjoyed an overnight Britstop at the Old Oak Tree in Thirsk. This was very convenient, the food was lovely and the people were friendly.
Max settled in quickly as her normally does. We settled in too.
Sadly we had to get Pepsi put to sleep recently and Max is missing her so we installed a Neos smartcam to keep an eye on him when we were at the Old Oak Tree pub for dinner. The Smartcam worked a treat, even with the van lights off.
If you’d like to monitor your van over WiFi the NEOS Smartcam is worth looking at.
We have used aires across Europe and really enjoy using these. We’ve often wondered why we don’t have aires in the UK, especially with the growing popularity of campervans and motorhomes. This is our first time using Brit Stops (https://www.britstops.com/) and we did this at Metal Bridge Inn, near Carlisle.
We really enjoyed it here. It is very near the motorway and the train line isn’t too far away either. However, the road and rail noise we had read about wasn’t intrusive for us and we liked the convenience of the location. The staff at the Metal Bridge Inn are friendly and the food was lovely.
This Brit Stop is adjacent to the River Esk. There’s a narrow track along the river where you can walk your dogs.
As I said, the noise we read about wasn’t a problem for us. It certainly did not bother Pepsi sleeping in her usual spot in the cab
Nor Max sleeping…
We tried to capture the sunset in the video below. If you watch carefully you might catch a glimpse of the bat flying around…
Captured some aerial views of the Esk estuary, the village and the yachts moored whilst flying my drone. I flew over to this area to escape the Oyster Catchers.
Oyster Catchers got too close for comfort when I was flying my drone over the sea at Ravenglass. They were quite determined too. I eventually backed off and flew somewhere else just in case they did crash into me.
McNaughts On Tour 