So I'm probably not taking my purple teapot

my purple teapot

Now that the euphoria of our successful single night in Bailey is wearing off, we’re moving forward and planning the far greater challenge of a Weekend Away! Small steps, people, small steps!

Calculating weight allowances is the most complicated holiday conundrum I think we’ve ever faced and fortunately Dave has the patience to be doing all the working out. Caravans are tricky things if you want to a) be legal and b) not break it. There’s maximum weights for the amount of caravan you can attach to your car, for the amount of stuff you can put in said caravan, and for the amount of additional stuff that you thought would go in the caravan but that it now turns out will need to go in the car. The most irritating aspect of all this though, is the difficulty in finding out exactly what is and is not included in the manufacturers guidelines. Bailey and Citroen both Please Take Note!

Important for caravans we discovered is the Mass In Running Order weight. This is everything you need to run the caravan, but not necessarily to run the holidaymakers. So surely you’d expect essentials like the gas bottles to be included, and the leisure battery, and the spare tyre? Our Bailey has a generous 147kg over the MIRO so we thought we could take loads of additional Stuff. But Dave has now discovered that that the gas (24kg), the battery (20kg) and the spare wheel (19kg) might need to come off that allowance. Might, might not, depends which forums you read. Bailey the manufacturers are resolutely silent on the matter. So possibly only 84kg available.

Same story with the car. Kerb Weight allows for a fairly full tank of diesel and probably a driver. But we can’t find anywhere where Citroen categorically says ‘yes’ for the driver, so we’re having to allow for ‘no’. And drivers are quite heavy – especially this one (not-telling-you kg)! On a positive note, I now have a great incentive to seriously get back into my running. The less I weigh, the more shoes I can take!

Finally in our current considerations, there’s the Nose Weight which is the amount the weight of the caravan pushes down onto the tow bar of the car. It can be adjusted a little by moving stuff around the caravan space, but mostly depends on the amount of tat I’ve stowed. And the nose weight gauge itself uses up 1.5 of our valuable kgs.

So I can take my stripey picnic rucksack because it contains a full set of plastic ‘crockery’: red china dinner plate 700g, red gingham plastic plate 50g. My prized Le Creuset oven dish (1400g) downgrades to an admittedly far more versatile tin pie dish (100g) and it looks like I might even have to cope without my purple pottery teapot (800g).