Introductions

Right... here we go!
This is my very first blog entry, so please forgive me in advance for waffling, time wasting, and my general naivety at this form of communication.
In time honoured tradition, I think the best place to begin is with introductions.

This is us... Steve, Annie, and Big Brigadier.

Annie & I have been married since 2008, having been together for 7 years before that. We live & work in Bournemouth, U.K.

Big Brigadier is the first motorhome that we've owned, and we bought her in October 2011. She is an Autosleeper Legend (The Auto-Sleepers Story), running on a Ford Transit chassis. Originally registered in 1996, she had one loving owner prior to us who kept her in immaculate condition. There were only 43,000 miles on the clock when we purchased her, which for a Transit is practically brand new!

Our interest in motorhoming came from Annie's parents, who have owned a Bessacarr motorhome named 'Bessie' for a number of years (Bessacarr Homepage). They kindly allowed us to borrow Bessie on a few occasions, which gave us our first taste of freedom and the open road.

We grew to love the lifestyle, and embarked on what turned out to be a 2 year search for our first van.

When I say 2 years, it wasn't non-stop! We looked intensively for a about 4 months, then left it for a while, then we'd search again for another couple of months until we got bored, and so on.

We had a fairly good idea of what we wanted: a 2 to 4 birth coachbuild (Motorhome body types), with a rear lounge, preferably diesel, within our fairly tight budget. Age wasn't a big concern, as long as the condition was good, and it came with a full service & habitation check.

All of our research was done on the Internet, using websites such as AutoTrader, Gum Tree, eBay, etc., along with numerous second-hand motorhome distributor websites based in and around the Dorset & Hampshire area.

We went to view a handful of motorhomes, and whilst most were good vans, there was something about each that didn't quite meet our requirements, expectations, or dreams.

At a point when we'd pretty much abandoned the search for a while, by sheer fluke our perfect van materialised when we were not even looking for it!

Having just returned from a holiday to Majorca, we arranged to meet up with Annie's parents in Bessie at Baiter Park, Poole (Map), for an afternoon of catching up. I was flicking through a Motorhome magazine that Annie's Dad had lying around, and there was Big Brigadier in a 'for sale' advert for a local garage. Annie & I went to view her that very same afternoon, and the rest as they say is history.

Over the course of the next week we had another two viewings, paid a deposit, sorted out insurance, and then finally paid the outstanding balance & drove her off into the mid-day sunshine!