CARAVAN HOLIDAYS
[To the Editorh f 0, the SPECTATOR.] Sia,—In your last Travel Notes (I think in April) you asked readers who had caravanned '.to write concerning their experiences ; hence this letter. Although I had for many years enjoyed camping life in various forms, I had had only one short experience of caravanning until March of this year, when I acquired a font-berth "Uplands " "motor caravan, mounted on a to " Ford " chassis. Since that time my wife, daughter and inyself—generally with a friend to occupy the fourth berth--
have spent each week-end (lengthened when mundane affairs permitted) in little tours from London, with the result that our knowledge of the byways of the Home Counties has been greatly enlarged, and we are now all most enthusiastic amateur gypsies, for whom the week-end has come to mean a glorious release from the trammels of over-civilization, without any surrender of its decencies and comforts.
To put. first things first, I, who started on my little Odyssey a nervous "crock," to whom the task of driving the
van out of town was a nightmare in advance, am now as lit as any man need wish to be, with all the energy which
a normal eighteen hours a day of fairly strenuous life calls for. Then, too, as I look back over the .weeks, I realize that I have never shared so intimately in the wonder of spring as I have this year.
We have gained a great deal of knowledge—almost invariably pleasant—of our fellow-man. Wherever we have gone we have met with the greatest hospitality, and made many friends whom we hope to meet again. True, we have done what lay in us to deserve our reception : first, In' never taking up a pitch until we had sought and gained permission to do so, and, of course, offered payment except in cases where it would have been tactless to do so ; second, by remembering that we were guests, with guests' responsi- bilities ; and last—and very important, this—by clearing up scrupulously before departing. In our experience, following out these simple rules, and a friendly attitude generally, has secured us, not only a hospitable reception, but a warm invitation to come again.
Country folk, we find, are invariably interested in the van and its appointments, and reams could be written on the many interesting people, ranging all through the social scale, to whom it has served for an introduction, and into whose lives we have been permitted a peep. Peers and peasants, tinkers and tramps, and many others of high and low degree have smoked a cigarette or dipped into the tobacco-jar over a chat, and enriched our gallery of reminiscences.
To any of your readers who are thinking of caravan holidays, I would recommend affiliation with the Caravan Club of Great Britain (secretary, Mr. J. Harris Stone, 28 (haring Cross Road, W.C. 2) and the Camping Club of G.B. and I., 1 Princeton Street, Bedford Row, W.C. 1. Both have lists of suitable camping-places which arc at the disposal of members, and offer other advantages also.--
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