Less of a ‘wow’ on our return visits in 2019
We have returned to the Chew affiliated site twice in 2019. We chose the site due to close proximity to Bath, as we were in the process of packing up, removals, cleaning and completing on our house sale.
We had a fully serviced pitch in May and a standard pitch in June.
The fully serviced pitches are ‘easy’ and you don’t need to worry about running out of water or overflowing the wastewater. The overall the site is well maintained, some of the pitches are ‘tight’ our awning has a ‘shaped’ front and we do need to request our caravan is parked ‘hard-over’ to the edging board to ensure our awning fits on the gravel pitch.
This year we have a new addition of a puppy, firstly we got in trouble for parking ‘on the pitch’ when cars are only allowed to be parked on the roadway across the front of pitches for loading/unloading. This appears to be a bit of a silly rule, as you are then blocking the roadway for other arrivals and returning motorhomes. Secondly, the dog walking area is fully fenced, but the rules mean dogs must be kept on leads at all times. The dog walking area is also adjacent to a woodland walk (which dogs are not allowed in) but I have never seen anyone use the woodland walk.
The individual shower rooms are starting to look ‘worn’ and need a thorough deep clean and some TLC in places. During our May stay the radiators in the shower rooms were still switched on from 7am-10pm, which made for sauna like conditions. Thankfully the radiators had been ditched off when we returned in June.
During May there were more motorhomes than caravans, but a large proportion of the motorhomes had accompanying small cars. The car park does not have marked ‘bays’ and the car park shape is not square, so some of the spaces have a reducing length. There is no indication provided by reception, nor polite request, that if you have a small ‘accompanying’ car to please be considerate and park at the far end and hence leave the ‘longer’ spaces closer to reception available for larger tow cars. This resulted in us returning on at least three occasions to a ‘full’ car park at 10pm, due in a large way to inconsiderately parked smaller cars.
Early one morning we did need to use the ‘out of hours’ contact as the electronic gate had failed in the ‘closed’ position. We believe due to heavy rain the power supply to the gate had been interrupted. The staff member arrived promptly after 10minutes and manually opened the gate so we could be on our way.
Will we return, possibly, if we are visiting Bristol and Bath, but then maybe we will just stay with friends next time.
