What a difference heat makes!

Before I can get carried away with making my bespoke willow interior, my to do list for my VW camper has been to make sure that she is mechanically sound, watertight and then to get some heat into her!  I’ve been incredibly fortunate to find an amazing VW camper van specialist only a mile away from my home.  Over the past few months I’ve increasingly realised that it takes some gumption as a woman to take on a VW Bay window camper van of her very own.  To have brilliant mechanical assistance just down the road is incredibly fortuitous and signals to me even more how Nigella the camper and I are meant to be!

When reading up on T2’s it seemed notorious that you can a. never demist the front windscreen and b. always will have a cold wind whipping up between your toes.  So that’s what I expected… and got!  Until last week I’ve had at times somewhat bracing, if not slightly dangerous Autumn journeys.  There’s nothing quite like finally getting to grips with the floating steering nature of a T2 only to find that you have to hold onto the wheel one handed whilst frantically continually wiping the windscreen with the other.  My absolute recent highlight was a very frosty early morning commute to Coates during which ice remained for the 30 odd miles within the windscreen, my feet became numb and my fingers were so frozen that I had to drive solo handed, alternating sitting on them!  I quickly came to the conclusion that this is why, since early September, I’ve not seen another T2 on the road – they’re all wrapped up snug for the winter in their cosy garages!  Nigella will never have such luxury and leisure time, so to the specialist she went… and what felt like a miracle occurred.

The heater that was added when converted by Danbury no longer spews out cold air on an ad-hoc basis.  Suddenly I have heat at my feet and the sound of a jet engine erupting.  Fortunately Nigella’s previous owner had fitted a really good stereo speaker system and I now know why!  We also discovered that the electrics had never been wired up to the front windscreen, so no demisting had ever been possible.  This made so much sense, because no matter how much I had been wiping her screen, it was rarely fog free, with the resulting headlight flare making driving her feel pretty precarious.  I’m now very grateful to my VW specialist and extremely apologetic to Nigella for ever having visions of holding a hammer to her whilst checking the windscreen policy excess on my insurance.

So now I have heat, with the added bonus of one very warm and happy doggie companion!