Camping at Carsington Water in Our Motorhome

We’re camping at Uppertown Farm Campsite, Carsington Water in our motorhome.

We’ve been back in the UK for two and half months now. After keeping us safe and comfortable all winter, our poor old motorhome’s been neglected. Well, that’s not entirely true. He’s had his main skylight resealed after it leaked in very heavy rain. And he’s got a brand new handmade exhaust (don’t ask how much) after we discovered his old exhaust was snapped in two half way across Spain. Oh, and we repsrayed the habitation door.

On the Bank Holiday weekend we stayed in the new CL created at the farm where we store our motorhome. Our friends Chris and Tina, who we first met parked next to each other in the motorhome aire in San Sebastian in 2011, drove over in their motorhome and we had a couple of nights living like old times. It was actually great to stay at a site less than a mile from home as we knew the best places to take them. But otherwise he’s been sat doing not much for the past 10 weeks.

Why? Why haven’t we been out in him? Hmmmm, let me think.

For the first couple of weeks we were in quarantine. But after that, we were just happy to be home and campsites were only just opening. When we set up our mad-cap early retirement life experiment we included access to bricks and mortar here in the UK (we’ve just been featured on the Exit 45 Travels site if you want to read our story). That was in 2015, and of course we’d zero idea a pandemic was heading everyone’s way. COVID forced many full-timers into renting property, and some even gave up the motorhome lifestyle entirely. Our thinking back then was simply that we wouldn’t full-time in our motorhome as we preferred having a link to a static community in our home nation. When the pandemic hit, we were very happy to be able to come back to the UK and quarantine/isolate without worrying about where we could stay safely.

We’ve used those weeks to update all of our motorhome books for Brexit, COVID-19 and any other changes we’re aware of. More energetically, I’ve booked a 50 mile ultramarathon in Snowdonia in September. Yep, it includes running up Snowdon, and three other high points in the park. It’s going to be quite some effort to complete (gulp!). I’ve been slowly cranking up the training to about 50 or 60 miles a week and so far it’s going well, no burn-out, no injuries. The months of long runs are going to be a real slog, but the end result (assuming I finish the race) will be worth it.

I’ll be honest: news articles about the UK being rammed busy this summer haven’t filled us with enthusiasm to tour our home nation(s). We’ve been spoiled rotten abroad, with the continental aires network in particular. We’ve only booked ahead a handful of times in ten years of touring. With this in mind I popped a question on Facebook asking how fellow vanners were finding the UK. Most responses were positive: plenty of space so far. Many staying at the smaller sites with fewer facilities were pretty much alone. We know from experience the media can’t help itself. No-one’s going to read a headline like “Campsites in Popular Hotspots Full, Others Have Plenty of Space”.

While all this might change come the school holidays, we’ve a couple of weeks before our second jabs, so have come for a look for ourselves. At the moment I’ve a side window full of green. I’m looking out across the fields and woods around Carsington Water in Derbyshire from our £10-a-night farm campsite above the water. The dam came into operation 30 years ago, providing thousands of millions of gallons of water (there’s a great educational visitor’s centre here – don’t miss the Kugel if you come). The lake’s used for watersports and fishing, but we tend to stick to the land. We enjoy running or walking the 8 mile route around the shore, making occasional forays off-path to the odd pub around the route.

The farm owner Paul came to collect our money last night in the steady rain, spotting the ourtour.co.uk decals and asking us not to write about the rubbish weather, jokingly, I think! I told him we’d mock up some photos of the van up here in the sunshine (although we don’t need to as it was wall to wall sunshine when we were here last summer). The weather is a bit of a downer to be honest but that’s nothing to do with this lovely little site. It’s been raging hot sunshine for the past week or so, but hey, we’re not in a tent, and the skylight’s stayed 100% dry (on the inside, the important area).

The field we’re in is our favourite as it has the best view. However it does slope, a potential grassy /muddy trap for multi-ton front wheel drive wagons like ours after heavy rain. We’ve stayed at the top where it’s pretty flat, although the ground’s still completely solid. We’ve avoided parking under the adjacent tree too. Why? Because rain falling on the van roof makes a fair bit of noise, but it’s easy to ignore and fall asleep to. Add in a few random heavy splats from a tree or power line though, and the pre-historic brain thinks something’s coming for it and keeps the eyelids wide open!

There’s plenty of space in the field we’re in, although the rally field opposite has a temporary Camping & Caravanning Club Holiday Site for £7.50 a night. The wardens and one of the club reps explained it all to us and we’re checking if it’s worth us joining the club for 2021. The temporary sites are normally for 2 or 3 weeks of the year, although some are for longer. There are lots of rigs, flags flying, including a US-style RV, a fairly rare sight in the UK.

The sun’s refusing to appear but we’re seeing a couple of amps from our solar panel flowing into the leisure batteries. Handy, as there’s no electrical hook-up here to recharge the batteries there is fresh water and a handy elsan point to empty the loo as there are no toilets either).

Our gas bottles are brimming with LPG so we’ve no problem keeping the fridge cold and the water hot. On our way out of storage we headed to the fuel station down the road which we normally use to get LPG to find signs on the pumps: out of order. Errmmm! While abroad we learned this happens all the time: it’s always best to have a plan B when getting LPG. Did we have one? Nah, I just stared at the pump handle like a muppet. But Ju got her head in gear and pulled up mylpg.eu, finding another place en-route, a garage called Dynotech which fits LPG systems, not a normal petrol station.

We arrived to a narrow curving entrance, pulling up short, unsure if we were about to get stuck on someone’s driveway. Ju jumped out and did a recce and waved me in. The LPG refill point was ancient, a thing of beauty! Ju was given a padlock key and instructions from a receptionist in the office: remove the lock, turn the pump power on, twist this nob to reset the dials to 000000, attach the pump handle to the van, press and hold this button, come back and tell me how much you used. It all worked fine and reminded us of a similar system on the Lofoten Islands in Norway. We’ve a 17Kg capacity Gas IT system, about 34 litres, and if we don’t run the heating it’ll last us maybe a month without using any electrical hook-up, so we’re sorted for the next couple of weeks at least.

After we’d arrived we did a speed test on the internet. Children of the internet generation, we are not (I’m 49 next week, I remember those spinning dial telephones!), but we rely on the internet heavily now, like almost everyone else, and like having access to it everywhere we go. Without our roof mounted antenna we were only seeing about 1Mbps on the 4G connection we have. With it we’re getting about 3Mbps here. That’s not quick, but it was fast enough to stream the England-Scotland Euro 2020 match on our TV via our Amazon FireTV stick and Superdrug Mobile unlimited SIM. Well, almost, it buffered for a second or two a handful of times so Ju wound up the sat dish and we watched the second half that way.

Where next? Dunno. We might stay local(ish). We’ve the Peak District National Park just to the north of us, and although we live relatively close to it we rarely explore it. Or we might ping off and head somewhere else, Wales maybe. We’ve another couple of nights before we have to decide, but I think we’ll find somewhere and book ahead rather than just wing it as we usually do. As I said, we’ve been spoiled over the years and needing to book removes a teeny-weeny bit of the magnificent freedom motorhome touring has gifted us for all that time. But these remain unusual times, and there are plenty of folks who’d love a tiny piece of what we have, so we’ll stop whinging and get booking.

Cheers, Jay

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