February 2016. Getting Goodies on the Van.

Our next trip out was to a company in Taunton called Van Bitz to get the satellite system fitted so that Darren will be able to work while we’re away, they were also fitting the air conditioning unit and the alarm system.

Funnily enough the site owner there seemed rather nervous when we mentioned the problem Darren had had reversing the van onto the hard standing at Menehay Farm and he decided to change the pitch we were SUPPOSED to be having and made us drive the wrong way round the camp site so that Darren only had to reverse straight back on to the hard standing, which he did effortlessly.

There was a huge storm on the first night and were expecting the awning of the caravan next door to have blown away by the morning, amazingly it survived!

A member of staff from Van Bitz kindly drove us into Taunton during the two days we stayed on their site while the work was being done on the van.

We enjoyed exploring Taunton, it was a town we hadn’t been to before, or so we thought.   It was a cold day with an icy wind that seemed to blow straight through us so our priority became to find somewhere warm where we could sit and have coffee.  We discovered a department store that sold a good cup of coffee and some very nice cakes and stayed in there while we defrosted.  When we braved the cold wind again we stumbled across St Mary Magdalene Church and realised we had actually visited the church when we were guests at our friends Tom and Sapna’s wedding a few years ago, they had a beautiful wedding held in the beautiful church.

We visited the museum while we were exploring the town, it kept us entertained for ages.

Somehow we also managed to buy two fold up bikes in Taunton when we wandered out of an alleyway while we were exploring the town and came across a bicycle shop called Bicycle Chain.  The weather was a bit chilly and as we had been contemplating buying fold up bikes for the trip we thought we’d pop in and see what they had in stock.  The assistant who came to talk to us was extremely helpful, without being ‘pushy’, and he spent so much time answering our questions that we decided he deserved our custom.  We love our fold up bikes.  They only had one of the particular bikes we had chosen but the manager ordered another in for us to pick up the following day on our way home.  We were very impressed with their service.

The staff at Van Bitz were also very good at their job and they made us feel very welcome on their site.

This trip furnished us with yet another lesson, it’s now ingrained in our brains that we MUST remember to unplug the electric cable when we leave the site, luckily we remembered that gem JUST as we started to drive off.

We also discovered that there is a Black Hole in our very small fridge, that’s the only explanation for the disappearance of the large Twix that I went to get from the fridge to have with our coffee only to find it had completely vanished!  Darren swears he didn’t eat it!!! (not me gov. honest).  It’s a complete mystery!