Our First Camping and Caravanning Club Temporary Holiday Site

Greetings from Zagan the motorhome in his very first Camping and Caravanning Club Temporary Holiday Site at Lyme View Marina, north of Macclesfield (N53.331248, W2.092265)!

We needed to be club members to stay here, then it costs £11 a night (there is no electricity, but the solar panel’s enough for us).

There’s a ton of space, although I’ve just heard there’s another 13 rigs arriving today (Friday – weekends are often busy with sites emptying out Sunday night). Even with our mega-roof-internet booster, the WiFi is very slow here, but it still works for uploading blog posts.

Yep, we’re back on the road. We enjoyed a few days at home, hiding from some serious downpours! Luckily we saw the forecast and I nipped back on Zagan’s roof and sorted a leak around the solar panel cable before it hammer it down. The roof’s now 100% watertight, huzzah!

We even managed to pull on our club running colours and get in our first formal race in over a year. The run was meant to be a relay in teams of four, but to meet COVID-19 requirements was changed to a time trial format where each team’s members ran at the same time.

My dad and uncle came to watch at the finish, which made it a bit more special for me. It was the first time we’d seen some clubmates in many months too, and the sense of some degree of ‘normality’ was palpable. We really, really enjoyed it (once the hard running was over!).

So, how did we end up here? Curiosity is to blame! We sometimes need a bit of a shove to get us to pack up our stuff at home and get back into the van. Particularly when we get drawn into reading news articles implying every last British campsite pitch is booked-up, forever. To get us over the ‘hump’, we sometimes book into a campsite at Carsington Water, a farm site by a reservoir a half hour drive from home.

The last time we were at Carsington Water we saw that the farm’s ‘rally field’ was busy with motorhomes and caravans, and as we walked past, went to have a chat with the organisers. They were very friendly and helpful, explaining it was a temporary C&C Club site and that it cost £7.50 a night, which was £2.50 a night cheaper than we were paying in the field opposite. You needed to be a member of the club to use it, which costs £42 a year for a digital membership on direct debit.

We mulled it over a bit as we walked around the reservoir visitor’s centre. Yonks ago when we owned Harvey the RV (our Autosleeper panel van) we were members of the C&C Club, staying on some of their sites when we toured the UK in our holidays. We weren’t able to get away from work for long though, so probably didn’t get our money’s worth from the membership and let it lapse. We’ve spent most of our time since then touring Europe, and didn’t need access to either the UK’s two big clubs (the other being The Caravan and Motorhome Club), as we never booked any sites in advance.

The C&C Club and C&M Club both have loads of 5-pitch sites called Certified Sites and Certified Locations respectively (most folks know them as CSs and CLs). These are usually no-frills farmer’s fields, charging a tenner or so a night, and often have space when the bigger sites are full. The clubs help the farmers get a site set up, avoiding the need for planning permission.

Lots of CSs and CLs will let you stay without proof you’re a member, but formally you do need to be a club member. We threw caution to the wind in the end and signed up to give the club a try for a year.

We’ve had our second vaccination jabs a week ago, so in another week’s time we could technically head over to France with just a negative antigen test and some other bits and bobs of paperwork. While France remains on the English ‘amber list’, we’d currently have to quarantine and take two PCR tests when we came back.

But that’s changing too. In ten day’s time English double-vaccinated travellers like us can go to an amber list country, and come back to England with just an antigen test in France (say), and a single day 2 PCR test each once we’re home. No need for quarantine. Travel insurance is easier and cheaper to get too, now the FCDO’s travel advice has changed.

It’s temping folks. I love the UK (well, most aspects of it!), but after all those years touring Europe I’ve been a bit spoiled driving and parking-wise. I’m sure there’s a bit of rose-tinted glasses going on here and I should read our own blogs posts to refresh my memory.

Driving to this site yesterday, squeezing down miles of narrow, twisting country lanes lined with stone walls and hedges, I managed to cook the brakes, something I’ve only managed before on miles-long mountain descents! The brake pedal went spongy and the wheels far too hot to touch when we arrived here. I’d given myself a decent stress backache too and was very happy to get on the ramps and the handbrake on.

Driving in Europe surely wasn’t this hard? And we could just nip along quiet roads from low-cost aire to low-cost aire? No need to book in or out, mostly located close to town or a beach unlike the UK’s network of ‘middle of nowhere’ campsites? And the Tour de France is on at the moment too! That’s a free-for-all when it comes to motorhome parking on the route, a fantastic event.

Anyway, we’re not heading off to foreign parts just yet, maybe not until next year. The antigen and PCR tests are getting cheaper but they’re still no fun worrying about what you’ll do if one comes back positive and you’re sat at the ferry port. It seems to me there’s still a fair bit of negative feeling around foreign travel too, although if we headed off we’d stay socially-distanced from folks (more so than in the UK as we wouldn’t know anyone to get close to!) and probably not come back for months.

There’s also talk of a hefty wave of infections come the 19th July when most restrictions are eased. My dad’s been double-jabbed but with his COPD (lung disease) he’s looking at maybe going back into voluntary shielding for a while to try and avoid being infected, and will need a bit of support. So, we’re holding fire and staying put in sunny Britain for the time being, enjoying trying out some new stuff like this site before heading up to the Lakes for a bit.

Back to the Camping and Caravan Club. It’s been going for 120 years, and I imagine it’s morphed organically over time. So it’s not quite as simple as it being a company with sites which are all managed centrally. There are the CSs mentioned above, which aren’t bookable through the C&C Club website. Then there are District Associations (DAs) which set up temporary sites like this one (there are small signs guiding you to the entrance here which just have NLDA on them – you have to know that means North Lancs District Association).

Then there are Camping in the Forest sites. And finally all of the club’s main sites, which are bookable online. That said, I’m not finding it easy to see which sites have availability without going into each one asking for specific dates over and over again, a bit frustrating.

So, anyway, we’re booked in here for another couple of nights and then heading up to sunny Keswick to one of the C&C club sites. We’re in Cheshire here, right alongside the Macclesfield Canal. The marina next to us is packed with colourful narrowboats, and there are many more in marinas and moored against the towpath for miles, a parallel world of small-space living.

When we came home from our first two year tour we seriously looked into moving onto a narrowboat, understanding the rules, maintenance, costs, systems-on-board, the downsides and looking around some boats. In the end the spreadsheet won out, and the bricks-n-mortar path has worked well for us these past few years, bringing us rental income and capital appreciation. The boat life remains a strong temptation though, we may well go that route in the future and I love looking at them as I run or walk the canals, wondering.

I was brought up and we still live near to the Nottingham Canal, so know ‘the cut’ pretty well, at least from a non-boater’s perspective. This canal’s been built differently though, instead of being built along the contours of the land, it was built using a ‘cut and fill’ method to go straight across the hilly landscape. Looking down from the towpath at people’s houses below the canal is a weird sensation for us.

We’ll spend our time here chilling out, cooking, writing, and running on the towpath and the old railway line path which run nearby. It’s a pretty easy-going site, friendly, nothing cliquey about it, all’s good. The caravans all have cars, of course, and are nipping out exploring the nearby Peak District, an obvious advantage to that mode of travel on sites like this. We’ll stay put though.

Days of rain have left the field a tad damp. Although we’ve mud and snow tyres fitted, I’m not sure they’d help us get our hefty 3500Kg front wheel drive wagon back up the slope if it lashes it down again. We’re facing downhill at the moment, so should be able to drive off OK in a couple of days, we’ll let you know!

Cheers, Jay

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