Coachman Vision on tour (part three)

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Hans and family towing the Coachman Vision 580/5 caravan

Hans and family with the Coachman Vision caravan

Caravan holiday history lesson at Eden Camp

With family friendly fun and a lesson in all things WWII, Hans gets to grips with stress solving activities on tour

• Find Coachman caravans for sale • Read Coachman caravan reviews • Watch the tour video

Welcome back

This is the situation: it’s 5.30pm and my family and I have just got our Coachman Vision 580/5 back to its pitch at Flamingo Land. The slight issue is that our power cable and Aquaroll have been nicked while we’ve been out for the day.

So sitting inside a VW Tiguan I currently have the following: a wife in serious need of a glass of wine and a caravan with heating, a four-month old baby screaming his head off and a four-year-old boy who’s just announced in a particularly whiny voice that he needs a wee.

The relaxing family holiday

I’d like to say how calm I’m being, sensibly dealing with each problem one by one in an effective and mature manner. But, of course, I go mental.

Apologies to anyone at Flamingo Land who heard a string of expletives cutting through the wintery Yorkshire air. Seriously, who nicks a power cable and an Aquaroll? If you come caravanning you will have brought both of these items with you, so now there is someone out there who’s the proud owner of not one but TWO plastic barrels.

After taking Oscar to the toilet, I leg it to the holiday park reception, where the brilliantly helpful Flamingo Land staff immediately produce a replacement power cable. Soon, Alex cranks the heating up and within 15 minutes it’s baking. Seriously, Coachman should market the Vision 580/5 as the world’s first caravan sauna.

The water issue is more of a problem. Have you ever tried getting a new Aquaroll in Yorkshire at about 6pm? You can't. Oscar and I end up making a dash to the nearest petrol station to buy four massive bottles of Volvic to keep us going in the meantime.

Things are on the up

After a borderline miraculous night in which both four-month-old and four-year-old sleep pretty well, we decide to put yesterday’s theft woe behind us and start today in positive fashion with a visit to Eden Camp, an award-winning World War II museum. Now, as a parent, I find myself endlessly inventing exciting ways to dress up the fact that we’re about to do something that Oscar might find dull, but knowing that he has a fairly unhealthy obsession with guns and military hardware means that Eden Camp shouldn’t be too tricky to sell to him.

“Oscar, we’re going to a museum about World War II today,” I tell him. He looks confused. “Daddy… what’s World War II?” This is one of those times when children stump you. It’s not as if he’s asked me something I’ll genuinely struggle to answer, like how much the sky weighs or the reason water’s wet, but how do you sum up six years of mass genocide and more than 50 million fatalities into a pithy, child-friendly sentence? For better or worse, I say the first thing that comes into my head: “It’s when we beat the baddies.”

Coachman caravan tour Eden Camp

Having distilled the deadliest conflict in human history into a six-word summary, I drive the family to Malton, and Oscar gets excited about the prospect of seeing planes and tanks. When you get to the entrance of Eden Camp, there’s certainly no mistaking the general vibe of war: machine guns and a couple of spitfire replicas greet you but you’re glancing around thinking, ‘Where’s the actual bit where we look around?’ It’s only when you get in that you realise the magnitude of the place you’re visiting.

Impressive history lesson

The site is comprised of about 25 ramshackle-looking huts, which operated as an active Prisoner of War camp during the 1940s, holding first Italian and then German soldiers. The whole experience is a mixture of fascination and grim reality, discovery and face-slapping sobriety. Each building has a different theme on show, such as evocative newspaper cuttings from the era or genuine clothes worn during the war. They’re all interesting and relatively jaunty, but it’s the more reality-based huts that hit you.

We walk into one that replicates what it was like to be inside a U-boat, the deadly German submarine that was a scourge of British forces during the war. It’s dark. Claustrophobic. Sinister. I come out of there after two minutes thinking that I definitely do not want to go inside a real submarine during my lifetime. But that’s like an inoffensive children’s tea party compared to Hut Five, which has a small sign on the door that simply says ‘Blitz’.

Walking cautiously inside, the first thing that hits you is the noise. It doesn’t so much assault your senses as repeatedly batter them with a massive metal crowbar. The idea is to get some comprehension of what life was like during an air-raid strike, and it’s utterly terrifying and unnerving: apart from the noise, it’s dark and creepy and it smells and my diaphragm is tightening; I last about 10 seconds before I want to come out. I don’t let Oscar go in.

It’s rare that you can go somewhere that offers such a diverse experience, and it makes Eden Camp a genuinely enriching place to spend a few hours. Incredibly, entrance is only £6 for adults and £5 for over-fives – amazing when you compare it to most other family attractions in the Yorkshire area or even the UK as a whole.

We arrive back at Flamingo Land just over an hour-and-a-half and 40-odd miles after leaving Eden Camp, with Morten’s gentle snoring continuing as I turn off the Tiguan’s ignition.

Time to relax... and eat

A period of in-caravan chilling ensues, before thoughts turn once more to dinner. Having already mined some of Flamingo Land’s eateries, we ponder venturing outside of the theme park for a change of scene because, well, you don’t always want to eat in the shadow of a massive rollercoaster, do you? The iPhone is called into action once more as my sausage fingers clumsily Google ‘child-friendly pubs Kirby Misperton’. One called the Black Bull Inn comes up – a pub which we’ve driven past a few times on the main road to Pickering – it’s less than two miles from our caravan and I remember it looking rather nice.

After a while, we make our way there and as soon as we walk in, greeted by a crackling fire and a friendly landlady, I inwardly pat myself on the back for another great find (it’s even got the Black Bull Caravan Park right next to it if you don’t fancy staying in a theme park). It’s simple pub food in nice surroundings done really well – Oscar’s child portion of sausage, chips and peas was massively generous so unfortunately I had to help him out a bit, but that’s the kind of caring dad I am. It’s well worth bearing in mind if you’re in the area and a bit peckish.

It’s been a fantastic day. You know those days where you don’t really feel as if you’ve done very much, but it was highly pleasant while you went about it? One of those. I have a feeling tomorrow will be just as much fun but distinctly less relaxing: our family of four is hitting the city of York…

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