“How do you reverse it?” I shouted out of the window to Ruth as I drove a
large 4x4 and even larger caravan out of the headquarters of the Camping and
Caravanning Club of Great Britain, heading for points south.
“Just do things the opposite way round as you do in your car…” she shouted
back as I sped off down the road, en route to North Devon. Perhaps sped was
the wrong word…crawled more like.
The Camping and Caravanning Club of Great Britain, somewhat foolishly in
retrospect, was lending me a towing caravan for the week so I could
experience what half a million other families and couples do every summer.
The number of touring caravans currently on the road surprised me but if you
are driving down to Devon in a car this summer, you can guarantee that every
single one of them will be in front of you. Now I was to join that growing
fleet of what are undoubtedly the most detested vehicles on the road (if
you’re not in one yourself).
I had asked Ruth about reversing as an afterthought. Somewhere deep inside me,
I knew I had heard that there was some special technique for reversing a
caravan. I almost didn’t ask at all. Why would I need to reverse the
caravan? I would soon find out.
The Camping and Caravanning Club has its headquarters in a surprisingly glitzy
building on the outskirts of Coventry. Its swankiness is less surprising
when you consider the club has 400,000 members - and the number has
increased by 10 per cent every year in the past three, although whether they
have been convinced of the joys of caravanning by self-confessed caravan
lover foreign secretary Margaret Beckett I am unsure.
Multimap put the journey from Coventry to North Devon at around three and a
quarter hours. However, given that the speed limit for cars towing caravans
is 10mph lower than the national limit and I had two children under three in
the back, I predicted something approaching double this.
As a result, we decided to break up the journey by stopping off to see friends
at their new house in Weston super Mare. Never having visited them before,
we rang on the mobile as we approached the town ands they said ‘Just head
for the pink house on the hill. That’s us.’. Bizarrely, the word ‘hill’
didn’t set alarm bells ringing.
After much wiggling through the back streets of Weston, we finally arrived at
the hill. It was only as I crested it that I realised I had already passed
the end of our friends’ road. Suddenly, what had been a nice wide road
halved in width as I went over the brow of the hill. At the bottom, I could
see it was only just wider than the caravan. Worse, there was one of those
red triangle road signs warning of twists and bends ahead. I slammed on the
brakes.
Looking in the side mirror, I realise the only way out was to reverse back up
over the crest of the hill and round the corner. My reversing round a corner
skills have deteriorated considerably since I took my test 13 years ago and
I don’t recall ever having to do it combined with a hill start and in
vehicles with a combined weight of three and a half tons.
Now what was it Ruth had said. “Do things the opposite way round.” I gingerly
stuck the 4x4 in reverse and started turning the wheel in the opposite
direction to normal. The back end of the caravan moved to within two inches
of a low brick wall. I shunted forwards again.
After several attempts, I was still getting nowhere and by now the Kia
Sorrento’s clutch was giving signals that it didn’t like this challenge. By
now, a huge traffic jam had built up and I was beginning to imagine local
newspaper headlines along the lines of ‘Stupid tourist’s caravan airlifted
out’.
