Welcome to this week’s show, when I talk briefly about our Pumpkin Picking trip and a few days we spent seeing the sights in Cheltenham.
Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means we will earn a small commission on the products or services you purchase using the links. There is no additional cost to you and if you do purchase, then I thank you for supporting the website.
I also thought I would share a quick note about something we find useful on the Campervan, that you may find useful too.
This week, it is our Minipresso Coffee Maker. Decent Coffee without needing power for it Here is a link to the Coffee Maker – https://tidd.ly/3sckque
Transcript (Auto Generated)
It’s Friday, the 17th of December. This is episode 31, and welcome back to the podcast. Hello, hello, hello and good morning. Good afternoon and a good evening to wherever and whenever you are listening to this. Thank you for being here.
It’s great to have you on the podcast again and welcome to this week’s show. If you are new here. Welcome. And if you’ve been here before. Welcome back we are a podcast all about UK travel and generally camper van life and all things to do with campervans and getting out and seeing what is around us in the
UK mainly. And we cover things like the trips that we go on. We take you to places that we’ve been to and I also talk a bit about the van and anything that we’re doing to it and some tips and tricks around the van in terms of perhaps storage or the bits and pieces that we like the most or the products that we’re using. There is no sponsorship or adverts or anything on the podcast, so it’s all me talking from the heart and giving you my truthful opinion on things. So we are going to talk today about a few more things that we did in 2021.
We’re nearing the end of it now, and this is a quick recap of what we have been doing. I think today I’m talking about what we did in October time, so it’s going to be Halloween. Ian walks in the forest and things like that, so stay tuned for that.
And at the end of the show, I will. Also, I’m going to give you a quick, some quick feedback or some quick thoughts on something that we use in the van and something that we every now. If you never show my stick at the end, a thing that we use in the van that we like that we
enjoy and that we can. It might be something to do with the cooking or something to do with how we set things up or storage or something outside. Just something that my feedback on something that I can’t do without, I suppose, or that I’d seen.
I think that is a necessity on the van. So if you like we here, don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Give me some feedback. If you enjoy the show, then stick a review on your chosen podcast platform.
And if you don’t, or if there’s something you’d like to me to chat about, then head over to Richard Chap dot com. The contact button and send me a message and I will respond to every message. I guess so without waste any more time.
Let’s jump straight into today’s show. So the like I say, we are recapping the bits and pieces that we did this year because the podcast ticks and found time for a few months, and I didn’t really talk about what we did.
So I’m using the last couple of shows to catch up on that, and I’ve covered lots of things over the past few few shows ranging from May all the way through to September about all our travels, and today a very quick chat about what we got up to in October.
So October is obviously Halloween. We live near the new forest, so there’s a few farms around that at October time. They lay out all their pumpkins and make a bit of a display and sort of invite people. And I guess it’s a fundraising thing as well because you buy a ticket and you can go and have a
look at the displays and pick your pumpkins and buy your pumpkins a lot more expensive than they would be at Tesco’s. But they’re also not Badawi’s we. I think we spend ¬£20 on pumpkins and I’m getting ahead of myself.
Sunny Fields Farm is where we went to and they do a good job by hand. If you hear the odd click, it’s because I’m looking at my pictures to refresh my memory and they have some displays there, like old tractors covered in pumpkins and some Halloween displays of which is in golden burrows and burrows, and trucks
and trucks and containers full of pumpkins. You buy your ticket in advance and you can grab one of their wheelbarrows that they put on offer and you can walk around. And if you see a pumpkin you like, you can throw it in the burrow and pay for it on the way out.
They have some massive pumpkins that we’re looking at. A picture now of Max standing by these three pumpkins, and the biggest one is probably three, four, maybe four feet in diameter. So they are massive.
Obviously, these are extreme, but we will have a couple of normal ones, but they have things like that there and they have massive hill covered in pumpkins. And all the rotten pumpkins were getting thrown into a big hole in the ground and they were stinky and there was a fake skeleton diving in and things like that.
It’s just the. And the quality of them, like I was saying a minute ago, are much better than the ones that we saw in in the supermarkets. There are a lot more expensive. I like £2-3 in supermarkets, but these £6-7 for the bigger ones, they sold them on the diameter.
So if it was at a no and a twelve-inch pumpkin would be more expensive than a six-inch pumpkin, which you’d expect. But we ended up spending ¬£20 on three pumpkins and some little bits and pieces. And as we have a lot of things I do here on my, I’ll give you the details at the end, but my and my website and YouTube channel has a blog post and a video about our time there. So if you want to know more about that for this or for next year’s Halloween, obviously you make a note and we’ll give you some information on that.
They have a cafe there and it wasn’t a great cafe I must have met, so I wouldn’t bank on it for lunch or anything. The sausage sandwich wasn’t great. The coffee was not brilliant, but they’re not designed for it.
What do they do, this once a year? So you wouldn’t expect it to be a proper cafe with all the mod cons So worth bearing in mind that while there is a cafe, take it with a pinch of salt, but is a good couple of hours that we spend there wandering around and having a look at some.
And also I’ve just clicked off my pictures there and I said I have some animated displays as well where there’s sort of skeletons playing music and which is talking to you and things like that, say dragons roaring. I think as well.
Excuse me. Yes, that was Sonny Fields in October the same week. We think, you know, into the forest for a walkthrough into quite a popular place in a new forest called Will Enclosure, which is why, in the heart of the forest in nice big wide tracks to walk around and plenty of parking, it’s one of the
few car parks with toilets in the car park. And yes, if you want to kill a couple of hours and go for a nice long walk, I think it was about five k. We did a five and a half K circular route so we could go to and from the car park on a circular route.
There was little extension on it where you could add a kilometer run if you wanted to, but we didn’t have to, but we did. And like I say, it all came to about five K and that is called willfully enclosure or willfully plane is another car park nearby.
So another great new forest. What it was, it was autumn turn that leaves on the ground and everything was golden, and it was a pleasurable few hours that we spend there. We then had lunch in the in the camper van afterwards in the car park and the how they cost us nothing that whole day, the two or
three hours that we spend there. I think we got there about ten ish left, about two ish because we had to do a school pick up. But it was it was is good to get out in the forest and, you know, enjoy the autumn, the autumn trees and things like that.
So that was willfully enclosure. And the final thing we did had nothing to do with the camper van at all. But we all went to Cheltenham. We spent it was half term, so we wanted to go somewhere with Max and we wanted to go somewhere that we’d never been before.
We decided on this occasion to fork out for a hotel, so we stayed in the jury zone on the outskirts of Cheltenham for I can’t remember if it was two nights or three nights. My photos will tell me.
The first photo was taken on the 26th of October and the last photo was taken on the 29th. So we stayed on the 26th when he says it was for three nights that we had there and we did loads.
When we were there, we were proper tourists. We went into into the town center and they had a thing they called a science center. Now we weren’t sure what to expect and it was a lot sort of more.
I want to use the word amateurish, but that’s not fair. But it wasn’t like a proper science museum or science center, Winchester, that we’ve been to before. This was very much organized, I think, by the local council. They had lots of good, interesting stuff there where you could play with.
What did they have? They have things where you can like heat sensitive cameras, or you could make molds from plaster of Paris with dinosaurs and make you look like a fossil. And they had a thing there that demonstrates how electricity works and how wind works and things like that.
So it was an hour that we spent in there with with Max and he, you know, he enjoyed it. He might learn a couple of things as well, which is always a good thing. We then popped. Into further into the town and just generally walked around, we did things like we had brunch at the Boston Tea Party
, which is a chain of cafes in the south of England. Really nice place. You have four coffees. We would have an indoor bowling bowling. We’re talking about an indoor golf course, mini golf like crazy golf. There are two courses and we went around there and we spend an hour or two in there where we could.
We played golf in like themed golf courses at a dinosaur one and the water one we chose. The underwater one was somehow finished on the dinosaur one, so they must cross over at some point. And we obviously wasn’t paying attention to any signs.
But that’s in the brewery quarter, which is a nice little area where they as restaurants and bars and breweries and things like that. And we after we finished in the Gulf and the Crazy Gulf, we popped into a a bar, shall we say, called the alchemists.
And they have a few of them around the country. And these this place makes really unique, shall we say, cocktails with dry ice and washing up liquid and they set things on fire. Not cheap, as you would expect.
But you know, it was it was good fun. Max had something called a bubblegum, which they put in the washing up liquid very, very tiny, tiny, tiny amount that I could see that bubbled up. At least some sue me is that’s what it is on the menu.
Who knows? They may add something, you know, non washing up liquid substitute to make it to give it the same effect and just pretend days by some washing up liquid. But it’s only look like washing up liquid, and it all bubbled up and he drank his.
Suzanne had one filled with dry ice that she held for a few minutes to dry. Ice dissipated and we had a whiskey one come what time you went in there? Now it’s only we. It’s only 5:00 on drinking whiskey.
My God. Well, I was on holiday and we then headed to a restaurant. I think it was the brasserie blanc restaurants, nice dinner and nothing really to write home about, as you’d expect, but pretty, pretty decent. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t spend too much money on this thing, so we did a few things and
it wasn’t expensive in the brasserie. Belonging might sound it, but it wasn’t massively expensive. But we did things like breakfast in the hotel room. We took stuff, we kept it in the fridge, in a campervan, and we were able to have cereal or croissants or, you know, sandwiches or whatever we wanted in the hotel room.
And we we took the milk and then I think we need it out of the fridge and had breakfast in the hotel room. And in the next day, we headed to somewhere called the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Steam Railway, which is a steam steam railway that runs between the two.
And you know, it’s just a good trip up and down the line on a steam railway. It was about, I think initially we paid about ¬£40 for the three of us to go on and we misread everything and we ended up going on the against the wrong staff and meeting the diesel train instead of steam engine.
So we had to upgrade to the to a what do they call it? It’s like a hop on hop off Typekit, where you pay ¬£60 for a family and you can get on and off as many times as you like throughout the day.
Not what we intended, because we only want to be there for an hour, a couple of hours, and thanks to my poor planning, that’s what we had to do if we wanted to get on the steam train. Not their fault.
Totally my fault. But the guards dressed up in the old style uniforms and you know, the the stations are made to look old fashioned and they probably are old fashioned with the old trunks lying around in a luggage trunks rather than today’s suitcases that you see.
And it’s just little props that they add to the whole the whole experience that gives you a step back in time. And that was really our two days that we spent two full days anyway. We went to board on the water, which is a nice little Cotswold town.
We spent a couple of hours there, had lunch, walked around looking a quaint little shops, and that was generally our trip to Cheltenham videos and blog posts for this again on my website and YouTube channel. So if you want to see more about them, then head over there.
I’ll give you the details for that at the end if you still hanging around. And that was pretty much October really didn’t do too much. Those three things are the things that we day to day trips in a couple of nights away in Cheltenham.
So I haven’t done this part of the show before, but I thought it might be useful for those listening to see the sort of things that we use in our camper van and the things that we can’t really live without.
So today I want to talk real quick about a coffee maker that I use now. I don’t use it all the time. But it is something that’s always in the van. We have a machine in the house. This one stays in a van and it is called a mini presso.
And it’s one of those ones that where you don’t need any power or any heat, you just need a coffee pot and a hot water and some hot water. So and it gives you a shot of coffee that you could then mix with warm milk if you’ve heated milk on a pan.
Or you could just drink straight if you wanted to. I am not a coffee connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t have these fancy pots and filters and crocheting beans or anything like that, but sometimes I just want a coffee, and I found this to be the easiest way is an instant no-no.
You could do instant. That’s fine. But this using this or sachets things like that. But I think just the quality of this is just a little bit better than the the the instant coffees and things like that. So.
And I use this. Let me find out the make of it because. I am just going into find where are we? Come on, come on, come on. Portable coffee makers. So it is called a mini presso portable espresso machine, and it basically has a it’s like a cylinder shape about the size of a small flask.
You unscrew it, you pop a pudding, you screw it back up again. In one end, you put hot water, you just pour straight from the kettle and then you pump it. There’s little thing that pops out and you squeeze and pump it, and it sends the hot water through the pods out the other end into a cup
and you’ve got a coffee, and you could then heat some milk on the on the cooker. And we also have a hand-held frother, which you can press a button. It spins and makes the milk frothy. In an easy we save for some reason.
And you’ve got a glass eye or something. And that’s what we tend to do. We tend to warm some milk in a pan and a bit of water in the kettle, pump out the coffee, mix it with the milk and you’ve got a nice camper van, let’s say.
So that is a a mini. Let me get the name of it again. Bah bah bah bah bah. We’re already here a mini presso portable espresso machine. I will put a link to that product down in the in a description in the show notes here.
So if you are interested in that, then go to let me get the link for my. I think it’s going to be Richard Chubb dot com forward slash. Podcast Forward Slash Episode 31. Or if you just go to Richard Champ dot com podcast, you’ll see all the episodes there, so there’ll be a link to there.
I’m telling you this because it will be an affiliate link. There’s a quick disclaimer. It doesn’t cost you a penny more, but it does help support what I’m trying to do here and keep the money. If you buy one, it might get me tempi if I’m lucky.
So by the way, even if you don’t just Google, the make of the thing, which is a mini presso portable espresso machine and you should see what I am talking about. So real quick, like I said, there are many places you can see all the things that I am doing and producing.
You can go over to Richard Chubb dot com and have a flick around there on all the menus and all the posts and stories I’m telling. And you can also head over to YouTube dot com forward slash Richard Chubb and you’ll see all the videos I’m doing.
And there is, of course, this podcast as well. I think I have a waffled on for a long enough we are going for how long are we going for now? Wow. We’re going to be 20 minutes as a bit of a long one this week.
That said, I cannot believe it is Christmas in just over a week’s time. So next week there will probably be one on Christmas Eve, which will be the last recap of 2021, and then we will be back into 2022.
Unbelievable. Let’s hope 2022 starts being even more like normal. 2021 was probably better than 2022, but we’re still dealing with this pandemic and hopefully we’re going to start seeing a big improvement look, just a little improvement in what we can do travel wise and freedom wise, if you like.
But thank you so much for listening. It’s really great to have you here. If you are a newcomer, like I say, welcome and to those returning to the show. Drop me a line. Say hello. I’d love to hear what you think and what your thoughts are on what I’m doing here.
But until then, we’ll see you next time. Have a great week and happy travels.