Bringing Gandalf Home
It was a momentous day! We woke with a mixture or nervousness and excitement as we headed to the train station. We had a long four hour journey to Yorkshire ahead of us and then the same for the drive home.
There and Back Again
We had spoken to the owner of the garage a couple of times on the phone and had told him what we planned to do with the van, he was converting a bomb disposal vehicle into a camper-van himself so we had lots to chat about and many tips to exchange. We agreed to meet at the train station near to him, where his son was to pick us up and drive us the last 30 minutes to meet the van. The train journey came and went without anything really exciting to tell you, we walked out of the station the other end looking for the van we were to be picked up in! Finally we found it and off we went. The owners son was also very friendly, chatting away to us, we had a laugh exchanging holiday stories, we’d all recently been to Spain where Ben and I picked up the most monstrous array of mosquito bites, counting over seventy on myself alone by the end of their feasting.
The drive seemed long as we waited with anticipation, we were greeted with friendly smiles and warm drinks. The owner showed us the campervan he was working on as we chatted camper business. The moment finally came and we were taken to see the van! We had a look round and were pleased with what we could see, we also had the comfort of knowing a mechanic had checked the van out and that it had passed its MOT just days ago. We were taken out for a drive in the van by the owner’s son and gleaned some van driving tips from him as we went around. Happy with everything we went to pay up and activate the road tax.
We stood there with the paperwork knowing Gandalf was now ours…. Wow!
The Return Mission
The next mission was to get home! The owner offered us some directions on how to get from Brighouse to the motorway in order to find our way back. I don’t know about anyone else but after about the fourth instruction my brain seems to zone out, accepting that it just isn’t going to remember more than that. I didn’t feel worried as I had my phone on me and could use the GPS on that. We strolled over to our new van and got inside, by now the light was fading so we scrambled around for ages trying to find the lights and familiarize ourselves with the van. It had some fuel, but not enough to get all the way home. Finding the fuel cap was a right game as it’s actually quite well hidden and discreet on a van.
Settling in, we drove around the car park a couple of times so Ben could get used to the turning circle while I attempted to get the route home to work on my phone. It was at this point, to my horror I discovered that O2 had a data outage on the network and we had no way of navigating home. Mortified I looked at Ben admitting that I hadn’t really been listening and asked if he’d taken in any of the instructions. Setting off with the pair of us having a vague idea of the first few instructions we headed out into the now rather busy work traffic! We seemed to do quite well with the first few directions and then we missed a turning, to be fair it was more of a slight gap across the road, where it wasn’t actually 100 percent apparent that you could cut across the road in that manner. We were now totally lost heading in the wrong direction, we didn’t really panic given our driving experience in the US where we did get lost a few times. After this thirty minute detour along a road which seemed to go on forever, we finally managed to take a few left turns to get back to the road we were supposed to be on and found a fuel station that was handy to boot!
The drive home was long and Ben managed extremely well, I am so proud of him! It was quite stressful having to wing it with the directions and making turns at the last minute when we saw the right signs, alongside that the van is big! He has driven the truck in the US which was long but Gandalf is a beast and there is no rear-view mirror because the van has a bulkhead. I am once again in awe of how he handled things!
