Tuesday 11th October - Cutting a deal

I awoke again quite early the next day, keen to hear what Simon thought about our next move after a hard night’s deliberation.  I was still really worried we were buying something far too big that we would struggle to drive and end up resenting.  But on the other hand, we needed the storage space!  Then there were the finances – we were really pushing it, even after the price reduction we’d squeezed out of them the day before.  Plus, registering the RV was going to cost us extra in sales tax as we were going to have to do this in Massachusetts.  I will leave the whole registration saga for another day but to explain briefly, each US state has different rules regarding sales tax.  Things are cheaper in New Hampshire because you don’t have to pay additional sales tax, good times!  But, as we were going to use Tash and David’s (I’m shortening that to T&D’s to speed things up as it’s now December in reality!) address in Massachusetts (Mass) as ours then we would need to register the camper in Mass incurring a 6% sales tax, a hefty smack in your bank account when you’re spending several thousand dollars at once you’ll agree?!  We agreed that due to the low mileage and the buy-back assistance at Campers Inn, the Freelander was the more sensible investment, but it was still a little too pricey.  We had viewed over 20 campers yesterday.  To see any more would mean driving many more miles out of the area and this could make the buying process more complicated than it needed to be.  We decided to be cheeky and try to squeeze more money out of the deal at Campers Inn.  I called Joe back and explained our situation.  I blamed the sales tax in Mass, the low value of the pound and our general poverty in needing to get the price down on the Freelander by another couple of grand.  I gave him our contact number at T&D’s and basically said that if they could do that, we’d do a deal. 
We hung around the house nervously awaiting a phone call.  It was good news!  A yes to the price reduction and, to quell my nerves over the size of the beast we were contemplating buying, Joe suggested we took the RV for a test drive before agreeing any purchase.

To celebrate, David showed us the way to the local Costco so that he could add us to their membership to be able to get lots of goodies at knock down prices whilst on our travels.  This included cheaper petrol, which from this point on I shall refer to as ‘gas’ as that’s been drummed into me since.  Costco was a new one on me. There seemed to be no sense at all to the arrangement of the wares inside the store.  I’m not sure how David knew where anything was, but we left with the stock goods vital for survival – beer, BBQ meat and toothpaste!

Simon and I then drove on to Campers Inn and met up with Joe.  He gave us the keys to the camper and told us to go ahead and have a good snoop around it whilst he finished dealing with something else.  The camper was even better than we recalled from the day before.  It was difficult to find fault with the finish inside and, though I’m not claiming to know what I’m looking at under a bonnet, sorry ‘hood’, the engine did look very new and well looked after.  Joe caught up with us, started the engine and drove the three of us clear from all of the other pristine trailers he was trying to sell before he let us loose on the steering wheel!  I took first go and Joe directed me out onto the main road and into real, moving traffic.  It was much easier than I expected.  Whether the local roads were wider to allow for novice drivers?  But by taking care at corners, even the fact that the steering wheel was on the wrong side did not phase me.  We drove into a carpark for some manoeuvring practise and swapped over so that Simon could have a go.  As there is no view at all to the rear of the camper there is a nifty little camera on the back that helps with reversing to a degree and the wing mirrors stick out a mile so as long as you’re happy that a gap is big enough for them to get through, the rest of the vehicle should follow.  Both feeling far more confident about the size of the van we returned to Campers Inn and signed on the dotted line, committing to buy our very first ever camper van.  In our initial discussions with Joe we had told him that we wanted to be on the road for the coming weekend ideally.  But after a pow-wow with their service department the earliest that our camper would be ready for us would be a week’s time, Tuesday 18^th.  There was no way round this so we just had to hope that we could stay on a bit longer at T&D’s and make the most of touring the local area while we could.  We booked an appointment on 18^th for us to be shown the ropes of our new wheels before we could drive it out and left Campers Inn with a great sense of achievement.

It transpired the delay in being able to collect the van would be a good thing.  On returning to T&D’s I got straight on with the business of transferring the money for our purchase to Campers inn.  Turns out there was a limit of 20K that I could move out of my UK bank account in any 24-hour period.  This is even when using an app that I am happy to recommend called ‘TransferWise’ that I was tipped off about by my brother and his wife in Norway.  Instead of having to go into a bank or make a very expensive call to the UK from abroad before being charged even more to do a bank transfer, TransferWise payments are very easy to set up on your phone using the app and are much less costly.  I set up to send the maximum I could that evening as there was no point trying to ring NatWest when it was the middle of the night in the UK.  TransferWise customer services were also very quick in responding to my panicked email asking whether the payment would still go through if I was moving the money in dribs and drabs.  They reassured me that they would wait until they had received the full amount to make my payment and let me know when this happened and they were due to go ahead.


Things had also gone from bad to worse with poorly Eleri.  She had not made good enough progress at home so she was being treated in hospital overnight, meaning that Tash and David became like passing ships, one of them staying with Eleri at the hospital whilst the other looked after Olwyn and things at home.