Day 28: Tuesday 15 April - Banbury and Bicester, by Ken

John’s 42^nd birthday today.

After breakfast Jane and I set off in Smarty to Middleton Cheney, just outside Banbury, to visit Elite Motorhomes to get an update on Mabel. It was one of the few occasions we have driven Smarty on a motorway as usually she is only used for local excursions from wherever the motorhome used to be based. She went surprisingly well cruising comfortably, albeit with a lot of wind noise from her soft top, at 70 mph down the M40 motorway.

At Elite we met Chris Maynard with whom we had been dealing over Mabel’s purchase. Chris showed us over an Autotrail Mohawk he had on display. It is very similar to Mabel except for a different seating arrangement in the lounge area and had a smaller garage (lower roof). Jane and I agreed we had made the right call in not going for a bed over the cab – it made the living area feel much more spacious and would avoid all those bangs on the head I suffered climbing into and out of Myrtle’s cab. The key difference we noticed is the sofas in the living area are significantly shorter than Myrtle’s, but there is a larger bench area in the kitchen. The seating is perfectly adequate for four and the bigger kitchen working area is a bonus. Also, unlike Myrtle the shower is separate from the toilet and hand basin with these facilities located on opposite sides of the vehicle adjacent to the rear sleeping area.

We learnt from Chris that they had sold Myrtle.

Chris phoned Autotrail to enquire about progress on Mabel to be told she was finished. At that very moment Sue Maynard came in waving Autotrail’s invoice that had just been faxed through. Next step was for Elite to pay the invoice and arrange for her to be transported to Banbury and that won’t happen until after the Easter break. However, it looked as though we should be able to collect her towards the end of the week.

Sue Maynard said it was their fault the safe in Myrtle was locked and they couldn’t unlock it, so they would replace it for us. 

Chris had a vague recollection he had passed my enquiry regarding fitting storage units in Mabel’s garage on to Jules, but talking to her we found she hadn’t followed that up. Paul Maynard (it seems very much to be a family business) then got involved and we decided we would sort out storage when we came back to collect Mabel. With Paul and Jules we also looked at the safes on display in Elite’s shop but these were too small for our needs. Jules was going to look into larger safes for us.

Following another look round the Mohawk on display we set a course for Bicester, a little further down the M40 where Jane was keen to visit Bicester Village – a collection of 132 designer outlet stores including Cath Kidston, Stella McCartney, Hugo Boss, Gucci, etc. etc. We had no trouble finding the place – the huge car park, which also contained a number of buses, was seething with people. After two circuits of the car park we couldn’t find anywhere to park so Jane went off to explore while I continued to orbit the car park. Jane wasn’t gone long, the place was packed with people and she felt she would rather start her exploration of British shops somewhere smaller. However, she wanted to return to Bicester Village when it was less crowded.

Next stop was the Market Square in Bicester to visit a wine merchant to buy John a good bottle of wine for his birthday. We had no trouble finding S H Jones shop, but it was closed Tuesdays!

Bicester High Street

Lunch was eaten at the Penny Black pub on Bicester’s pedestrianised High Street. It was our first English pub meal of the trip and we went for traditional pub fare - Bangers and Mash for me, Fish and Chips for Jane. It was interesting to see the pub menu had lots of healthy options with the calorie content of all the dishes and extras stated. That could be something they might want to adopt in the USA we thought.

Bangers and Mash

 A phone call found that S H Jones’ Banbury branch was open so we drove there and bought John a Central Otago Pinot Noir. Then we set a course for Coventry where we visited Go Camping who claims to be the UK’s largest camping store. We wanted to look at a replacement for the lounger we bought in France that took up half of Myrtle’s garage and camp stretchers to enable us to sleep outdoors on hot nights in Europe. We found what we were looking for and decided to return once we had Mabel as it would be impossible to get the stuff in Smarty.

John’s birthday was celebrated by a dinner that Ruth had gone to a lot of trouble over. Stella and Frank came along and we all enjoyed Nachos followed by very good roast pork, complete with crackling with birthday cake made by Stella and cheese and biscuits to finish.