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Western Daily Press columnist Chris Rundle dared to utter the unspeakable.
“Motorists hate caravans. They should pelt them with cowpats,” he said.
It was a remark that sparked more furious letters to the editor than foxhunting and the euro. So the editor threw down the gauntlet: hitch up and head out.

There are two great British freedoms – freedom of speech and freedom of the open road.

And it was a case of exercising one to the negation of the other.

After my off-the-cuff cowpats remark I found my Bank Holiday freedom of the ‘open’ road denied me by the touring caravan I was towing at the editor’s instruction.

The gist of his message was: “You decided to have a go at the caravanners – now get out there and try it for yourself.”

Now I’ve reached the stage in life where holiday equals comfort. A big hotel room with a fridge to stash the beer, a TV the size of a wardrobe, room service, staff to cook breakfast and a heated pool.

My idea of a holiday is not to be marooned in a windswept corner of Cornwall in a caravan where you have to walk with a permanent stoop if you’re as tall as me, be almost double-jointed to sit comfortably to eat, and know full well that you will go to bed breathing in the lingering fumes of supper. To say nothing of stepping outside and finding you’ve arrived in Tracksuit City.

For instance, Bob and Doreen both wore tracksuits and helped me manoeuvre the caravan into an almost level position for the night.

It was, they soon revealed, their 18th year of caravan holidays in Cornwall. Eighteen years of packing up their stuff in Danbury; near Chelmsford, and setting off to tow their home across the kingdom to the same area, always within striking distance of Bude,

They are deliriously happy this time because they decided to come overnight to escape the worst of the traffic.

They succeeded… “though once we hit the old M5 things slowed down a bit and I said to Doreen ‘looks like everyone else has had the same idea…'”

They’ve lost none of their pioneering spirit, the caravanners. For them, it’s every bit the adventure it was for the owners of the first rudimentary, and often home- built, caravans back in the 30s.

Just as the cattle and sheep drovers carved many of our roads across the medieval landscape, the caravanners have established their own well-worn and well-used communications network.

They return to them every summer.

And they’ll still gather at the end of the day to discuss how they negotiated that difficult left-hand turn coming out of Droitwich, how long they took getting across Salisbury Plain and what the North Devon link road was like this year.

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