Our Family Holiday 2011 Duinrell, Netherlands.

I'm a luxury hotel kinda Gal if truth be told!  However, this year we were on a tight budget for various reasons and agreed to join our daughter Chrissy and her family on a camping holiday. Camping? Me? Oh how we laughed! Well, I didn't laugh, but Paul and Matt laughed plenty.

My dad and stepmum have recently bought a 10 year old Fiat 590RL motorhome which they were generous in offering to us for a week.

So hohoho off we go.....we packed up the motorhome with the stuff we felt we'd need, and on Friday 29th July we headed to Dover for our Seafrance ferry crossing.
We thought (naively as it turned out) that allowing eight and a half hours to travel from Newton Abbot in Devon to Dover was plenty. BUT, as we hit the first hill, we discovered that we could barely do 30mph!! This was brutally brought home to us as we passed a double decker bus at the bottom of the hill as it pulled in to let passengers off or on, and then as we approached the top third of the hill the bus overtook us! This was not a good moment in our opinion, and we began to worry that we hadn't left ourselves enough time to get there. I have to say that we are used to being in the outside lane in our car, comfortably passing whatever we want to pass,  so finding that we could only reasonably stay in the slow lane only venturing out to overtake, say, a hearse or pony & cart, on the flat or downhill, was, to say the least, a shock for my husband.
We re-named the motorhome from FreeSpirit to this.......

Yes, snail! No offense mean't to dad or Carol, but it was how we felt.

2nd part of this serialized post will be here Friday 26th Aug.