Arrival after dark: How to ruin a relaxing weekend in twenty minutes

The Friday evening getaway is built entirely on a foundation of blind optimism. You convince yourself that if you leave work exactly on time, pack the motorhome with military efficiency, and hit the road before the rush hour peaks, you will be pitched up and sipping a glass of wine by eight o'clock. It is a beautiful dream. It is also a complete fiction, because the British road network has a sixth sense for a packed fridge and a desperate desire for relaxation.

Somewhere around a stationary junction on the motorway, the dream begins to die. You watch the dashboard clock tick mercilessly toward the campsite arrival cutoff time. By half past seven, the atmosphere in the cab has shifted from cheerful holiday anticipation to the tense, grim determination of a bomb disposal unit. You are eventually forced to phone the site warden, adopting your most apologetic voice to beg for the late arrivals area code and promising that you will creep in without making a sound.

The silent approach

Creeping in without making a sound is, of course, physically impossible when you are driving a three ton diesel commercial vehicle. As you finally turn through the campsite gates in pitch darkness, every mechanical noise is magnified. The gravel under your tyres sounds like a minor avalanche. The diesel engine, which seemed perfectly refined on the motorway, now sounds like a Victorian traction engine. You are convinced that behind every set of drawn blinds, a hundred seasoned motorhomers are judging your late arrival.

Then comes the search for the pitch. Campsites that look beautifully organised in daylight become a hostile maze at night. The passenger is deployed with a torch, leaning out of the window to illuminate tiny wooden pitch numbers while simultaneously trying to ensure you maintain the mandatory six metre fire spacing rule from a family asleep in a tent. Every shadow looks like a bollard, every bush looks like a water point, and you eventually settle on a patch of grass that seems vaguely rectangular.

The levelling ramp negotiation

This is the moment where you discover that the pitch is not flat. There is a brief, hopeful conversation where one of you suggests that sleeping at a fourteen degree angle builds character, but the prospect of rolling out of bed puts an end to it. With a heavy sigh, you realise you must extract the levelling ramps from the darkest, most inaccessible exterior locker. They are usually trapped behind a folding chair, a tangled water hose, and a bag of pegs you have never used.

What follows is a test of any relationship. The passenger stands in the darkness, offering vague hand signals illuminated only by the glow of the brake lights. The driver attempts to ease the motorhome onto the plastic ramps using the clutch control of a rally driver. You inevitably overshoot, drop heavily off the far side of the ramps with a plastic crunch, and have to reverse off to start the entire humiliating process again.

The whispered domestic

Because it is past eleven o'clock, this entire operation must be conducted in furious, theatrical whispers. You cannot shout "left a bit," so you resort to aggressive hissing and wild, interpretive arm waving. The tension peaks as you finally balance on the top of the ramps, pull the handbrake on so hard it threatens to snap the cable, and leave it in gear just in case gravity decides to intervene during the night.

When the engine is finally switched off, the silence is deafening. You plug in the electric hook up, stumble inside, pull the blinds, and collapse onto the lounge seats. The journey was stressful, the pitching was a disaster, and you are no longer speaking to each other. But as you finally pour that long awaited glass of wine, you look around your little home on wheels and realise that, despite everything, you are finally on holiday.