Wednesday 18th June- I told you it was inside out

Before and after

Today was awning put up day. We have never attempted this before for a number of reasons and so it was going to be a challenge

The first mistake was to put all the poles out as this is add to the general confusion as you need the poles in a set order.

Last year on a sunny day we did take out all the poles and mark them and pu them in bags marked 1 and 2, neither of us could remember why we did this but we did. Now we know why, the first bag contained the poles for the first part of the awning and the 2^nd bag the balance of the poles. It had taken us several hours to sort them out and now they were in a big pile on the floor. Great start!.

Having realised out mistake we started to sort them out and then tried to understand the erection instructions which are printed in 6 languages in extremely small print

The first step is to get the awning in the metal channel which runs around the caravan. This went better than expected except that we realised that the awning was inside out-brilliant. So we had to take it out and start again. Well given another couple of hours with many references to the instructions we finally finished and we surprised how big it is. This could be perhaps we had only seen this awning at a caravan show where it was attached to a much smaller van as against the one we have.

We liked the finished result but we would not this up again for a short stay but only for long stays over say a week or more. Next time it will be a lot easier and faster as we get to know the ropes, so to speak.

By the time we had finished it was rather late and we had to resort to the site take-away of chicken and rice, however it was really good as per usual and taken with a bottle of red organic wine.

Tomorrow we will finish sorting out the awning and cut the carpet to suit. Just like being at home.

The weather here today was brilliant and quite warm with plenty of sun and around 27 degrees centigrade. The site is still fairly quiet which is how we like it

We will try to catch up on some reading tomorrow and put our feet up for a while and watch the river flow past. This has a mesmerising effect accept so much visible water mean more frequent trips to the loo, oh the signs of getting old.