Today is Saturday, and this time next week the children will be at granny and grandpa’s house, and the grown ups will be at bug jam! I am so excited I can not wait! The only downside to this is that when we get back from an amazing weekend of all things camper van, I’ve got less than 48 hours to turn Freckle around and get packed for our 5 week adventure. So today we have allocated a morning to sort as much out as we can.

5 weeks in Freckle was such an exciting plan that we cooked up last summer. We managed 3 weeks last summer travelling around France and we thought of every way possible to avoid coming home. Our deadline was school starting back, and we even considered returning on the over night ferry getting back on the morning school started to have 12 more hours of fun. We decided that we would do it this year for the whole school holidays over a bottle of wine (or two) to really plunge ourselves into it. Now the reality is 10 sleeps away, work commitments mean Stew can only manage 3 weeks and I’m neurotically writing lists to make myself feel organised!

So today we need to deal with the burning issue of power. There are 2 problems. The first is vanity! Next weekend at bug jam I want to be able to wash my hair….. And blow dry it! The hours we have spent considering the options are endless. Will a 12v hair dryer work? should we buy a generator? how silent is a silent generator? can the power of the sun be harnessed for the purposes of vanity? and if so will I need to borrow penny’s pink princess hair dryer as its lower power! The second much less critical but actually quite important is cost. Over our 5 weeks we need to be frugal, and electric hook ups, in France, in high season are averagely 5 euros. With a 30 euro per night maximum budget we can’t justify electric in some sites.

We’ve borrowed a generator to try next weekend, and put it on last night…. Man is it noisy!! It’s supposed to be a quiet one too! I think it will offer us what we need for our gang at the festival…. We’ll all be able to charge our phones , dry our hair and play music on an amp, but its both heavy and noisy so is to going to be an option for France. So we are now back to the solar option, maintaining charge in the leisure battery. The hunt for the right kind of solar power continues, but time is running out!

The second problem ( I said there were 2!) Is that a couple of things in freckle run off the main battery, rather than the leisure battery. The main one is the stereo, which doesn’t automatically turn off when you stop. Obviously I forget to turn it off all the time so we are putting it onto the leisure battery so I don’t end up stranded.

So by the end of today I will have officially started the countdown to the big summer get away! I’m excited and terrified in equal measures! The kids are just excited though, who can blame them!

This is Freckle at Bug Jam last year