Summer = bus

According to the calendar, if not the ambient temperature, summer is nearly here, and that means it’s time to dust off the trusty VW T25 (Vanagon to some) camper ready for another season of holidays.

We’ve had the T25 for years, and it has become a trusted travel companion. Our first trips started with it full of beer, then mountain bikes, then various tandems and more recently, children. The later however, are causing the greatest problems for the bus, in fact they threaten its very existence!

Our bus is a classic VW conversion, as offered by Devon, Westafallia, Holdsworth, and in our case Bilbos, it’s a fantastic spacious layout for two travelers, but its not really designed with families in mind. Each year, as the children grow, there is a new problem to figure out. Where do you sleep another toddler? How can they travel safely?, where do we put all their stuff?

As luck would have it, the solutions to the problems normally involve a couple of hours drinking tea and pondering, a frantic trip to screwfix, and a few hours using core bloke skills like hammering, drilling and swearing.

Last year the problem was beds. Where do you put an engergetic toddler when the roof is out of bounds and there is only a double bed? I looked around and there wasn’t an off the shelf solution. The closest thing was a cab bunk from bluebird, but it doesn’t work if you happen to have head rests. In the end I built a bespoke bed base which rested on the cab seats and laid in a giant hammock strung between the head rests and sunvisors. It worked rather well, and had had the handy advantage of stopping nimble fingers accessing the controls.

This year the problems are multipled; we have a bigger, more energetic, more destructive toddler, and a new, not even one year old, grabbing, chomping baby. I think a lot of tea and pondering will be called for……