Project Erica: Part 16 - Grand Tour

I posted a new video on YouTube last weekend, giving a full tour of Erica now that she's as good as finished (really must buy some flooring...). You'll find it here:

By way of a reminder, at the beginning of August we took delivery of Erica, nearly two weeks after we bought her, and having never seen her before. At the time she looked like this:

A few days later and we had her stripped back to this state:

Then the real work began, and continued on until October, when she came to look like this:

Not exactly like that because until a few minutes before I took this snap this afternoon she had three matching sets of curtains and one odd-one-out set. Today I took the odd set apart and remade it, using up every last scrap of the cream fabric and almost all of my black-out material off-cuts. 

There are still a few things that we will do to Erica in due course, aside from fitting some flooring, such as tinting her windows (or having them tinted, or most likely tinting her windows badly, ripping it back off then having them redone professionally), fitting some rain deflectors to her front windows, and re-upholstering the sofa and the head-bumpers, but they're all nice-to-haves, rather than necessities, so I'm in no great rush.

Erica's Maiden Voyage - How Did She Perform?

What was our assessment of Erica after her first outing? Excellent! She’s very comfortable and surprisingly spacious for such a small vehicle, with that swivelling single passenger seat making a big difference to both space and utility. We can also pat ourselves on the back for how quiet she is when driving, with the combination of the sound-deadening and insulation killing the road noise that was intrusive when she was stripped bare, and with no creaks or rattles coming from anything that we built.

Even with the cold night, we didn’t feel the need to turn the heating on until about 7.30pm (and again first thing the next morning), and it did its job admirably … but with a lot of noise. I’ve since dismounted the fuel pump, wrapped it in closed cell foam and suspended it (taking care to maintain the correct angle) via some cable ties; it’s now much quieter, but I reckon I can probably improve it a little further yet by removing the pipe clips I used to mount the rigid fuel pipe upstream of the pump and replace them with some foam-cushioned mounts.

We also could do with moving the heater controller that we realised, before we even left home, we’d put in the wrong place. It’s fine during the day when the sofa/bed is in sofa mode, but having the controller under the bed isn’t ideal if you want to turn the heating on or off when you’re in bed.

We also need to think more about where we store stuff. Carelessly, I put the kettle, mugs and tea-making gubbins in a cupboard that’s not accessible when the bed’s out. I’ll not make that mistake again!

Then there was the issue of the cool box. We’d decided early on in planning Erica that she wasn’t going to have a fridge, yet somehow we didn’t think about the practicality of where we would keep the cool-box. It was as I was trying to find somewhere secure to stow it that Mick pointed at the shelf behind the toilet and asked if it would fit there. Genius! You’d think we’d designed the area for that purpose, it fits so well.

 

A securing harness would be good, but in the meantime, a blanket in front and a jumper wedging it in place from the side did the job. A good use of otherwise wasted space. Note that the rest of the curtains are not the same as this set. I don’t mind the chintzy look of the gingham, but the colour doesn’t go at all. I will, in due course, make them all match.

Erica’s small size also proved its value throughout the first day, when she proceeded along miles upon miles of tiny lanes. Whilst legally Bertie could have taken us along all of those roads, there’s no way we would have chosen to have him do that. Some of them (mainly those with grass growing down the middle) were tight enough for the foliage to be brushing slim Erica’s sides and even on those that were a clear 2m wide, the passing of oncoming vehicles often involved some manoeuvring, followed by both vehicles hugging the hedges and inching slowly; Bertie would have caused both difficulty and consternation. Then there was the unofficial 2m height restriction on one of the roads due to a fallen tree. I certainly could have bagged those hills using Bertie,  but it would have been a completely different trip, requiring an extra day and a bicycle. 

So, a promising start to her life as a camper and we look forward to using her more. (For the avoidance of doubt, we're also looking forward to using Bertie more; poor chap has only had two nights away since March. Having his engine started and being moved forward or backwards half a tyre-turn every fortnight is not  how he foresaw his year panning out!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Erica's Maiden Voyage

Tuesday and Wednesday 3-4 November
Where was Erica? She spent the night in a small parking area in Herefordshire, just a few hundred metres away from the Gloustershire border.
Weather: Lovely! Chilly overnight.

It felt like I spent most of last week making curtains for Erica (a process hugely more time consuming than making the sofa covers), however, I did also find the time to plan Erica’s first overnight trip (the reason for hastening on with the curtains). At that point, because I pay so little notice to the news, I was unaware that England was teetering on the brink of another national lockdown.

With Boris’s announcement on Saturday I contemplated whether it was still reasonable to go away. We would be back before the lockdown came into effect and would be completely self-contained and socially distant whilst away, so ‘go’ was the decision reached. This did, however, make us bad tourists from the point of view that the isolated nature of the trip was going to prevent us from spending money in any local businesses (a shame, as a breakfast out wouldn’t have gone amiss).

Monday morning was a flurry of activity as we packed Erica, with the impediment of not yet knowing in which cupboards things sensibly belong. Monday afternoon was a flurry of the final bits of curtain making (did I mention how long they took?! Such a lot of effort and at some point they’ll likely be completely redone in different fabric).

On Tuesday morning, under fine skies, we set out. Herefordshire was our immediate destination, with a list of seven hills that we were to visit before returning home. The plan, if all went well, was that we were going to do five on them on Tuesday and two on Wednesday.

All did not start entirely well; a small incident of programming the wrong destination into the SatNav (wrong hill; wrong co-ordinates even for that hill), but fortunately I spotted the ‘wrong hill’ error just in the nick of time (I didn’t spot the ‘wrong co-ordinates’ issue until it had inconvenienced us later in the day).

Wearing pyjamas to prepare lunch whilst sitting outside of a village hall – the starting point for our next hill

Aside from those issues, the rest of the day went smoothly and before we knew it the sun was sinking and with it the heat was leaching out of the day. I’d had in mind to spend the night in the vicinity of Wednesday’s first hill, but when we found the parking area by Tuesday’s final hill to be wholly suited to the purpose we decided to work on the basis of ‘better the devil you know’. The fast food wrapping and drinks cans that looked to be freshly deposited in the originally intended car park when we arrived there the next morning suggested our choice had been good and that we wouldn’t have had such a peaceful night there.

It was a chilly night for Erica’s first test, and we woke to a ground frost. Being on higher ground played to our advantage on this occasion, as a temperature inversion not only gave us a fine view over the cloud-filled valley, but it also meant that it was slightly warmer. We watched the thermometer drop as we drove down towards Cheltenham at rush hour on Wednesday morning (the downside of not having proceeded to Wednesday’s first hill at the end of Tuesday).

Wednesday morning’s view from our kipping spot

By early afternoon all of our hills had been visited, we’d enjoyed some lovely views in incredible weather and we were on our way home.

Seven summit selfies 

So, how did Erica perform? I’ll answer that question in my next post.