Opening page

So here we are.  The start of a new blog - The Motorhoming Devalls.

First of all let's introduce ourselves.  We are Paul and Claire. We have other blogs but not together.  The blog is owned by the misspelled Eldiss115 and we both contribute.

We bought Suki the Moho in March 2022.

Messanges Plage - December 2022

We had been looking at the idea for a number of years and didn't think we could afford it. At least not as long as we had a mortgage on our bricks and mortar house.  With that finally paid off, it gave us a little extra in our banks at the end of each month.

Claire retired from work a few weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. I continued to work from home after March 12th 2020, returning to my place of work in London just twice. Once to collect a new laptop and once to hand my laptop and other work owned stuff back to my boss!  That was two weeks before I retired on January 4th 2022.

The pandemic brought many things into perspective. Just how easy it would be to catch something and die was one.  Another was why have some money in the bank earning a pisspoor level of interest whilst we were stuck in the house.  The only trips out we did were to the supermarket and to walk the dog, Reggie, along the canal nearby.

With an ageing dog we decided that we could no longer put him in boarding kennels and so our holidays were going to be limited to the UK.

The Brexit cock up was no help. Reggie had a pet passport and had the rabies jab that lasted three years.  It meant that crossing the channel to France (or wherever!) meant showing it, checking the microchip number matched,  and then a worming pill before he returned home.  All that went up the swannee. 

So with the above life or death factors and Reggie in mind we started to look for a motorhome. 

We ruled out a VW (mainly) campervan as when you get to a certain age, looking for a loo in the middle of the night for a #1 or even a #2 isn't fun, so it had to have a toilet. We looked at a few and I kind of set a tentative budget of around £25000.

Once we started to look at dealers we quickly realised that this would not get us much. So I upped the budget to £30k. There were some reasonable vans about but they were generally all older, around 2007 to 2009.  Mileage wasn't a problem, as most were around the 30000 mile mark.

When we saw the 2013 Elddis Majestic 115 at the dealers in Rye we were immediately impressed.  At around £35k (!) it was way over what I had budgeted for, but was much better appointed.  Cleaner inside and looked a lot more modern. A test ride and I was hooked.  We went back for another look when it wasn't lashing down with rain and we bought it.  

It was late March.  It needed to be serviced and MoT done. We agreed on a collection date of April 1st - April Fools' Day!  Would that be prophetic?

I'll put up another post after this with links to a travel page I started on another platform. It saves me updating in two places!  

This is the home of the Elddis Majestic 115 aka Suki.