To make a caravan that works well at festivals is not that hard. At least it isn’t too hard to get a list of requirements together!
Some of you may have seen I bought a 1998 Bailey caravan for £1,200 off of Facebook Marketplace. We’d already spent a bit of time getting our tourer ready for the event, with tasks including cleaning a caravan and carrying out safety checks.
However, at any festival, you’ll want access to a toilet and a shower, a fridge, a cooker and a way to keep your battery charged for a few days without a hook-up (see: the best caravan leisure battery if you’re in need of one).
Penny, our 1998 Bailey caravan, was a little short on a few fronts here as we trundled off on our first trip, which was to a festival. We had a toilet, but the caravan’s water system wasn’t working, so no shower.
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More disappointing was the lack of a fridge, or to put it more accurately, the lack of a functioning fridge.
Penny has a non-standard mains-powered fridge installed, and without a hook-up, you are without a fridge.
But we did at least have our superb Icey-Tek passive coolbox, which keeps food and drinks frosty for three days. As long as whatever you put in the box is cold to start with, it will stay cold, using no power at all. Perfect.
On the road
When we set off for out trip with our 1998 Bailey caravan, our journey from Berkshire to Suffolk was pretty uneventful. The freshly adjusted caravan brakes, new tyres and greased towing gear certainly made progress a bit more comfortable than our journey home after we first purchased her!
Signposting to the camping field was clear, and there was plenty of marshalling, so we were quickly shown to our spot. As luck would have it, we were on the end of a row in the field at Red Rooster, which meant we were pitched up and glass in hand within 20 minutes of arrival. We also had a bottle of multisurface cleaner and a cloth in hand – a bottle of coffee liqueur had tipped over and bathed the lockers on the offside! At least they smelled rather nice.
Red Rooster is a delightfully family-friendly event, offering a brilliant mix of blues and country music, barbecue food and outdoor activities, all heavily themed around the swamplands of the American south. It makes for a highly entertaining event.
Although it was sunny, the moody woodland location did mean that it felt quite cold when the sun went down.
Happily, there were plenty of open fires and dry wood supplied for the stageside fire pits, which certainly added to the atmosphere at the show.
That said, when we got back to the caravan and couldn’t put the heating on, I must admit I wished I’d done a little more work before we set off.
But not to worry – we popped the Cadac on outside for a cup of hot chocolate to warm us up, and threw an extra blanket over our feet when we went to bed.
Project planning
To the cynics out there, it might seem that we had simply gone for a jolly weekend of eating, drinking and being merry, when we should have been fixing our caravan – but this was a crucial part of the process. No, really!
As we packed up and headed home a couple of days later, we knew a lot more about Penny and had been able to draw up a clear list of our priorities.
We now knew that Penny was a cosy place to sit and a reasonably comfortable place to sleep, and the basic set-up was sound. Thankfully, we found no horrible surprises, either.
What we learned from our first trip in our 1998 Bailey caravan
But before we tackle another festival, we do need to sort a few things out. The water and gas systems are first.
We need a new mounting plate for the external pump because the tabs have snapped off the one we have. You can buy replacement tabs for a fiver, or a filter housing from Filtapac for £40. Obviously, if we can get away with a fiver, we will.
Once we can get water into the van, the next thing to check is whether we can have warm water. The van has a familiar but elderly Carver Cascade 2 water heater. With no water in the van, it is hard to check the function of the boiler.
These can deteriorate and suffer frost damage, so the next step will be to see if it holds water. If it does, the final stage will be to see if it heats it up.
That leads to the gas system. We know the gas line to the fridge has been disconnected, so we need to see if it has been isolated in any way before we put a gas cylinder anywhere near it. A full gas safety check is very much on the list. Then the individual appliances can be assessed. The Truma heater, Carver water heater and cooker will be serviced. Then we can start getting our heads around a budget solar set-up, to keep us in power off the hook-up.
We are also going to have a proper look at the bed. As was common in the late 1990s, the seat bases are sliding wooden slats, rather than lifting frames. Over time, these slats can get a bit reluctant to slide, so we’ll look at making things move a little easier, but we also have to deal with some slats that have detached themselves from their fabric webbing. This is an easy fix, but gappy slats do make for a lumpy bed.
Other ‘nuts and bolts’ fixes include the rooflight, which doesn’t open or lock properly. Several locker stays are in bits, too. We also had nowhere to charge our phones, other than in the car. All easily sorted, but more items for the list.
Although we didn’t spend money on our 1998 Bailey caravan this month, the trip itself led to us spending a small fortune on beer and sandwiches while doing our research in the Suffolk sunshine. Money well spent, and motivation for the next few instalments of our project!
If you’re looking for something to use on your tourer to provide it with a bit of protection while out on the road, the best caravan polish is sure to help and get the paintwork sparkling.
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