Bertha has had a lovely time down near Chichester this weekend and felt very pleased with herself as she had some official duties to guard the amazing tepee tents hired for my cousins wedding (although I think she was less nervous than me who also had official duties as I had to give a reading – eeeek!).

The journey down south was slightly stressful as we hadn’t even left Leeds before the red ‘I-am-overheating’ light flashed up on the dashboard but she just needed a little drink of coolant and we were off. Whilst sitting in gridlocked traffic (and awful rain) several hours later (don’t you just love the M25!) we realised that our brake lights weren’t working but we couldn’t stop as we knew we had to relieve the poor family friend who was guarding the tents that night and we were already very late so we carefully continued the journey. Almost 8 hours later we arrived on site and after a quick snoop in the fabulous tents set up for the wedding reception we settled down for much needed sleep.

Thankfully the rain had stopped and the sun came out all day for the wedding which was great fun and Rich managed to grab a lift to the nearest Halfords with my Uncle and repair the break lights all in the time it took me to get glammed up in the morning – surely I can’t be more high maintenance than Bertha! Thank goodness we’ve finally got both my gorgeous cousins safely married off to lovely ladies. The beautiful bride and groom arrived to the church in style – a lemon yellow bay campervan borrowed from a friend – Rich had to inspect it of course!

Not only did we save some pennies on our accommodation but we didn’t have far to stumble after the wedding reception – just across the field to our Bertha. Following a big post-wedding BBQ at the tepee tents the next day we set off back up north with a plan to stay somewhere en route. Although people might think that owning a campervan means you can roam freely wherever you like and just set off on a whimsical camping adventure with no planning it’s not quite that simple. As many of you campers will know, sadly campsites get booked up very quickly during summer weekends so I had the arduous task of locating a campsite using the internet on my phone. We ended up with a spot at the ‘Bo Peep Caravan Park’ not far off the M40. It was a really nice site (although the site was large, our pitch was just at the edge of the site so felt quite private) with good facilities and very much in the heart of the Oxfordshire countryside – the site was surrounded by huge fields of corn and divided by little tree-lined paths. The nearest village, Adderbury, was worth walking into and was really picturesque with beautiful cottages and a village green.

The remainder of the journey the next day was hassle free although we felt that Bertha had developed a slight tilt in the last few miles of our trek up the M1 so this was slightly worrying and turned out to be a misshaped tyre….almost ready to blow according to the garage who looked at it the next day; a lucky escape, phew!

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