That was a week, that was

On Monday lunch time we set off for France with an overnight stop by Portsmouth ready for the early morning ferry to Caen.

On arriving at the campsite on the Monday I received a phone call while checking in.

“The house has been ransacked and they have taken my car” says my son.  Phone goes dead and the person on reception says it not a very good signal on site – it ebbs and flows.

As you can imagine trying to contact family, police, insurance companies while the signal keeps dropping is bad enough but when you have just left home and been burgled then anxiety creeps up quickly.  Over the coming hours we managed to understand what had happened and my son managed to secure the house and so having deliberated whether we should return home or continue we thought “not a lot we can do so let’s go in the morning”.

One hour later and we lost our water pump while filling the sink - Oh well that’s all we need I thought. Checking various electrical apparatus it appeared that we had all the other 12volt and 240 volt appliances working but had lost the voltmeter.  Went to sleep and upon waking the fridge had died while on 240 volt. 

First stop, at 5am at Tesco extra, was to see if I could purchase a battery charge as a backup. Lucky for us I could.

The ferry sailed at 8am and I thought I would phone Coachman to explain the unusual situation as I was confident the water pump had not failed.  The phone rang at the other end and a gentleman answered.  I asked for the technical department but was advised to call back in 15 minutes but please explain what the problem was so they could advise upon my return call.

15 minutes later I called and the technical department had already evaluated the problem and worked out some simple test for me to undertake to identify what the root cause was.  Naturally as I was on a ferry for 6 hours there was little I could do until in France.  Fears of my holiday going down the drain faster than ever – thoughts of making the wrong decision the night before came to mind.  Coachman offered their electrical design team to contact me when I landed in France so that they could talk the problem through thoroughly.

AT 3pm that day BCA Leisure phoned, talked through the problem and identified that the charger had appeared to be failing inconsistently,  an extremely rare occurrence.  As we were not getting to campsite until 8pm that day he advised us to undertake the tests once settled and he would then phone first thing the following day (Wednesday) to sort out remedial actions.

On the evening, at campsite, we connected everything up and guess what, everything was working perfectly. Fantastic we thought and were a bit red faced thinking we had made a mountain out of a molehill.  One hour later the pump and voltmeter went dead. Then the fridge went dead again.

On the Wednesday morning Coachman phoned and we recounted or misery and together it was confirmed the charger appeared to be failing.  Not a problem, we texted details of our caravan off to BCA/Coachman who promised to FedEx a charger to us on site.  It was a very simple process to change it and safety issues were discussed.  I was confident that this was a simple job and so awaited a parcel to be delivered.

Thursday morning arrives and we thought we would go for a bike ride as we expected a parcel, perhaps Friday.  Upon returning to the camp site the parcel had arrived at 2pm the day after it was sent.  30 minutes after receiving the parcel we had full use of everything.

In today’s modern society you often here of manufacturers being maligned for all sort of deeds but in forty years of caravanning I truly have never experience service like this and would like to publicly thank Coachman and BCA for working together to ensure we had a great holiday.

I certainly know what make my next one will be.