Darren Beale

With the rapid approach of middle age pulsing through my veins this weekend I attended a Camping and Caravanning Club manoeuvring course in Cheltenham. Apparently one needs to book well in advance to go on one (thanks Ackers) and after attending I can see why; it was excellent.

I went because this coming Friday I collect our new, to us, second hand 5 berth ‘van from the local dealer that Cathie put a deposit down on sometime in Feb. Seeing as I have *never* towed anything before and the ‘van we’ve bought is a big one I was looking to minimise the stress by getting some moves locked down plus I wanted to see if it was physically possible to reverse something that big up our tight, sloping and gravelly drive.

The course starts off with an hours classroom where one of the instructors - there were three, all of whom are qualified driving instructors - stands up and shows a few slides summarising a confusing array of legislation relating to various weight ratios between ‘van and car. I suspect that to more experienced caravanners - over 50% there had been caravanning for years, they were just looking to get some best practice under their belts - this was all old hat however to the n00b over in the corner it was exactly the sort of stuff that I wanted to hear so I made lots of notes.

After this painless and well delivered classroom session we spent the rest of the day split into teams of 4, 1 per instructor, and did maneuvering exercises:

• Hitching & unhitching
• Reversing in straight line
• Reversing around a corner to the left
• Reversing around a corner to the right

At the end we had about 30 mins spare (we shortened lunch) where we all had a few minutes to practice anything specific. For my slot I got him to take me driving forwards around the block a bit - it was a large car park at Cheltenham racecourse, so not on a public road - and then we moved the cones around to try and map out the tricky terrain outside my house where the access is tight to say the least for reversing into a much tighter uphill driveway.

As I say it was an excellent course and I now feel much more confident about pulling a caravan around. I also found out that my bus Shogun, as suspected, is an ideal towing vehicle with lots of torque. As it is also quite wide I’m not convinced that I need the extra mirrors, but I’ll still use them; I’m pretty sure by law I need at least one of them anyway.