Typical

We became motorhome owners in July. Typical retired folk, we fancied the idea of the open road, like Mr Toad, with our own toilet and tea-room, escaping lockdown, not having to share breathing space with others. We bought our 10-year old Elddis with 25,000 miles on the clock, for £30,000 from a reputable dealership which has branches all round the country, glad of their promise of a pre-delivery check, a full handover explanation of how the thing works, back-up in case of newbies’ problems, and a starter pack which included waterhose, levelling ramps and mysterious bottles containing pungent blue and pink stuff. 

So far, so typical. There were some bits missing from the starter pack, but we got them a week after purchase. 

Our first outing was a great success, an afternoon out to our local beauty spot where we brewed tea and ate beans on toast. Our second was to a CL for two nights, where we had difficulty getting fresh water into the MH. We didn’t know that we had a Whale system, and the dealer explained that we needed a different sort of waterhose, which they duly swapped for us on our slightly testy return. We had been struggling to fit an ordinary hose onto the Whale input unit. It seems the dealers had taken the Whale fitting off our hose to give to someone else. 

Emboldened, we managed to book a week in Scotland at a Club site. On the third day, water poured from behind a panel in the shower room, and despite the best efforts of the charming site staff, could not find anyone to fix it. We came home, and the dealer discovered that a joint in the pipework had come adrift. They fixed it and gave us a free habitation check next July by way of apology. Is this typical for people who buy second hand motorhomes? we wondered. 

Wanting to get the most from out exciting new life before the weather got nasty, we booked another CL this time in the Peak District. We cooked a real meal on our first evening, but on the second the gas system failed; the MH had not moved during the day. Cheery fellow members applied their experience to our plight, and we phoned the dealer. It’s the regulator, we were told; it might get better if you do a few miles with the vehicle (to jiggle the ball-bearing in the regulator) or tie up the green button with a cable tie. 

Back home I rang the dealer. Is this typical? Do we need a new regulator, or should we chalk this up to experience? Our learning curve was already perilously steep, and Mrs Toad and I are starting to lose our nerve. Don’t worry, we were told, it’s unusual; let us know if it happens again. It did, yesterday. We brewed hot water for coffee in the morning, and had no gas in the afternoon. And yes, I did connect the spare gas bottle, in case we had run out. 

Is our experience of buying a second hand motorhome typical? There seems to be something going wrong every time. The log book tells us that the vehicle has had four previous owners. Have we bought a pup, which the last suckers got rid of because they were anticipating technical issues? Or should we just grow up and keep learning?