To give our confidence a boost, we went on an introductory caravan driving course, organised by the Caravan Club. It was fantastic. There were a few lecture classes, but in all honesty we’d both read the book that had been sent out with the course papers, and the talks didn’t add much.
The glory of the course was the practical work, tackled in groups of three. We started with the simplest of all manoeuvres, driving forward, and allowing enough room around a slalom course.
But soon we were adjusting mirrors before starting the dreaded reversing.
We were shown how to put little telltales on the caravan to help with reversing and to avoid jack-knifing. Then plenty of practice, with one person driving, one person acting as banksman, and one person observing
We were shown how to get out of trouble if you went too wide, or cut it too fine:
We practised shuffling the van in order to move it a metre to the right or left. We reversed nearside to the curb, and offside to the curb.
We left on day two more than happy that we wouldn’t disgrace ourselves. Thank you Dave at Appletree Driving!
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