Monday 7th January 2008
We collected our awesome new home today and as new and strange as it is to be calling an aluminium travel-trailer ‘home’, it feels kind of normal now that we are here. Possibly because it’s practically all we’ve thought and talked about for the past four months.
We haven’t really moved out of our flat yet, but have decided to spend the night in the Airstream. As I write it is around ten-thirty at night, we’ve cracked open a bottle of champagne, a recently bought CD of Fairport Convention is swirling comfortably nostalgic folk-rock sounds around us, we have dimmed enough of the lights to create a cosy atmosphere and I’m thinking, ‘I could get used to this.” We appear to have all we need right here.
The team at Airstream Europe were very lovely today. There was even a big red ribbon tied around our trailer, which we ceremoniously cut before Earl ran through what’s what, where, how and why in a very clear and systematic way. Everyone else popped his head round the door at some point to see how we were getting on with our initiation.
They all exude a lot of pride in what they are producing and they have been very encouraging to us concerning our choice to go full-time in an Airstream.
Michael kindly towed us to our campsite (it’s still another two days til we get our very own big, fat car). I followed in our old VW golf, so I got to watch the beast on the road. IT - WAS – BEAUTIFUL and I kept catching myself grinning. As Pete and Michael turned off the main road into a quieter country road, with snow-capped fells in the distance ahead of them the scene could have been from a TV advertisement.
We have chosen a site with every kind of facility to get ourselves settled into this new way of life. Will we ever be really ‘roughing it’? It doesn’t look like it, but we’ll definitely go for more basic sites once we’re more familiar with this fine capsule of coolness.
Comfort is the order of the day for now. We are still in Cumbria after all, so of course we’ve had all the weathers in one day; strong winds, hail, rain, sunshine, grey skies and that backdrop of snowy peaks.
My, this champagne doth make my pen to flow. Better check it before I post it.
Oh yes, it also happens to be three years to the day since we moved from London to Cumbria. The weather was wilder than today, gales and floods in fact, and we moved into a dark and damp throwback to the dingier aspects of student-like accommodation, the like of which has not been endured (by us at least) since the nineteen seventies, complete with an avocado-coloured bathroom suite.
Clearly this move is rather more to our liking.
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