Staying in Solihull

While setting ourselves up with a motorhome, we stayed in Solihull, a borough just outside of Birmingham where my grandparents grew up. We were picked up from the train station by Trevor, my something-cousin-something-removed and Keith, his father in law, my grandfather’s brother, and therefore my great uncle (I’m getting good at this) and driven to Keith and Olga’s (my great aunt’s) house. Shall I draw a graph?

We spent three very enjoyable days with Keith and Olga (Trevor and Jane stayed too, in their motorhome parked out the front, for two days). All four are absolutely charming, and provided us with very entertaining and enjoyable company. Keith’s mannerisms are so similar to those of Alan, my grandfather, it was remarkable. It was interesting too, having conversations and realising that we are very alike — we all seem to share the some values and opinions. Keith’s even vegetarian, like I am.

After Trevor and Jane spent a day with us heading down to Chipping Sodbury to get our new home, Keith and Olga took us out to Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire (of Norman origin, the 1100′s). My first castle! We had a very nice time wandering around and listening to the audio tour thing (and I had some fun with HDR photography).

The next few nights we spent with Pauline and Bill, my great aunt and uncle from the other side of the family — Pauline is my grandmother’s sister (the fact that both lived in the same town surprised me, until I had a duh moment and realised that Pat and Alan, my grandparents, both grew up and met in Solihull).

We originally were planning to just spend the night with them, and they generously offered to drive us down to Chipping Sodbury to pick up our motorhome. Then, the international bank transfer hadn’t gone through in time, so we had to wait out the weekend. It turned out to be fine though, and we got to spend a bit longer with Paul & Bill, and met one of their friends, an eccentric but charismatic ex-MI5 agent. This guy was good friends with Princess Di (seriously, there’s photographic evidence!), and provided security during his career for a wide variety of public political figures. Cool.

In the meantime, Pauline and Bill drove us across to Stratford-on-Avon, one of those things one has do to, as a tourist, and wandered around the town a little.

When the time finally came to go meet our new home, we went via a picturesque little village called Tewkesbury, situated where two rivers meet, and recently victim to a flood that had most residents living in caravans out the front of their soggy houses. No more though; we went for a walk along the river and back through the streets. As with many other villages we’ve passed through, we were impressed with the attention to detail: Flowers in baskets dangling from many buildings and the lamp-posts, for example, make a huge difference to a street. Aussies just don’t seem to care about that kind of thing. Whatever, mate, slap another supermarket in!

Anyway, that’s it for that chapter of our trip — we have a motorhome now! Woohoo!

Home

We’ve found our new home!

The whole thing went infinitely more smoothly than we expected — it was the second motorhome we looked at, too. In Birmingham (specifically, Solihull), we stayed with Keith and Olga, my great aunt and uncle, and met Trevor and Jane, my…first cousin, once removed, according to Yahoo answers, and her husband. They are fulltime motorhomers and really took us under their wing.

They had some contacts who sold motorhomes, and got in touch with them for us. One contact, a motorhome dealer, Trevor and Jane had met in Spain and were quite friendly with, and also a motorhomer, couldn’t be contacted. I idly googled the name of his company ‘Motorhomes R Us’ and, surprisingly, somehow stumbled across a working phone number someone had left on a forum posting. He reported a couple of potentials in the yard, so Trevor and Jane generously drove us one and a half hours south to a little village called Chipping Sodbury.

The first motorhome we looked at, a ’94 Fiat Hymer, was fantastic — very mechanically sound, a robust and popular model, with a fixed bed at the back. Then, the second one we looked at, almost identical to the first, but a year earlier — a ’93 Fiat Hymer — and with the same robust mechanics, had a ‘dinette’/workstation at the back instead of the bed.

We spent about 20 minutes inside looking around; it quickly dawned on us that it ticked every one of the things on our wishlist, far above and beyond what we were expecting:

• Bathroom (toilet and shower)
• Diesel (2.5 Turbo Diesel engine — very solid and reliable)
• 3 burner gas stove
• Three-way fridge/freezer
• Sink
• Under 3.5 tons
• Left hand drive
• Gas heater (and AC)
• Bike rack on the back
• Big safe
• Two workspaces

The bed, a double, pulls down from above the cab — it can be left with bedding on it, and just pushes up out of the way during the day so the space is used efficiently. It’s got plenty of room to sit up in bed, unlike a lot of the models we looked at previously.

We took it for a test drive (something I’d been dreading and had been cultivating a good bunch of stomach butterflies over), me behind the wheel with Steve the dealer sitting beside me guiding patiently as I routinely drifted towards the wrong side of the road, took roundabouts about twice the speed I should’ve, and missed the entrance to the yard at the end, then having to go around the block again. Driving a decent sized van from the other side of the car wasn’t quite as hairy as I was expecting, though, so I’m not quite as nervous as I was.

Steve made us a great offer that included a year warranty, which floored us (if any, 3 months is usual), and also agreed to install an LPG gas tank for the stove/heating/fridge/hot water (better than detachable propane tanks, apparently), a 300W pure sine wave inverter, solid leisure battery and security locks on the doors. We decided against on oven/microwave, as we don’t really need either and the space is more valuable.

The ’93 and ’94 Hymer models are apparently particularly good quality — lesser quality models replaced them in ’95, with poorer construction and less durability, so we’re quite happy there. It’s a similar model to Trevor and Jane’s first motorhome too, which they were very fond of.

So, we got a motorhome that meets our needs perfectly, and from a dealer who we trust and have a personal connection with. No trawling eBay and driving all around the country to look at individual vehicles. We paid £14,000, with one or two hundred more to be paid for a couple of late additions.

Now we have to wait until the international bank transfer completes (we were hoping to pick it up tomorrow, but apparently will now have to wait until Monday). We can’t wait! More photos when we’re in. Then the home-making begins.