Driving Horizons - Campervan & Travel
A Campervan & UK Travel Podcast. Offering Tips, Tricks, and Reviews on all things VanLife. Stories from our trips. Talks about Gear and even the odd review. Covering things such as Camping Gear, Repairs, Cooking, and General UK Travel. Join me as I ramble away, usually weekly, sometimes monthly!! Please feel free to subscribe to be kept up to date, and why not get in touch with any travel tips or ideas of places to visit.
Episodes

Friday Feb 11, 2022
Friday Feb 11, 2022
Welcome to today's show!
Today I talk briefly about an awesome touring park I stayed at. Then I talk about a few great sites that are easy to visit, and in beautiful locations in Devon.
This includes Langstone Rock, Jacobs Ladder, and Byes Riverside Park.
Links to my content:
www.drivinghorizons.com
www.youtube.com/richardchub
Social: @drivinghorizons
The transcript below is auto-generated, so apologies if it reads strangely!
It is Friday, the 11th of February, this is episode 38 from welcome back to driving Horizon's. And low, hello, hello and a good morning, a good afternoon and a good evening to whenever or wherever you are listening to this.
Richard here, welcome back to the podcast. If you are new here, then welcome. And if you aren't a regular, then of course, welcome back. So it's been a busy week, mainly in the office this week. I've been doing lots of editing to get some videos out.
Last week show you may have heard me talk about the motor home and camper van show or the now set motor home camping show I went to. So I'm not going to talk about that this week. You can find all about that in last week's episode, but what I am going to talk about this week is some
of the amazing things that I did while I was down in that part of the world. So the motorhome and camper van show was in West Point in Exeter and I stayed down there. I saw some sites around Exeter and a couple of places on the way back, so stay with me to hear about the suggestions I've
got for the area and the great places that we were that I visited when I was down there. I spotted a couple of things this week in a magazine that I wanted to and I wanted to share with you.
I picked up a copy of the Practical Motorhome magazine, which talks about much of homes and camper vans and things like that. I don't think it really touches too much on on caravans, but on one of their pages, they were talking about the site winners that are judged and awarded by the AA.
And one of the campsites that they have awarded Campsite of the Year to for Wales is one that we visited a couple of years ago. And just by chance, because I put this video out long before I saw this magazine, I recommended this campsite for one that we would definitely revisit in 2022.
So it looks like the AA have good taste because if I can recommend it, then obviously it's good enough for them as well. And the other thing I saw in there was something called night stops. Now night stops is I don't know if anyone's familiar too much with Harvest's hosts that they have in in America is basically
businesses, you know, things like wineries, breweries, places that have lots of land where you are allowed to register and all these caravans, motorhomes, whatever they want to call them over there can park for free. But they are expected, I guess, is the word to use the services of the venue at your park here.
So if you're staying at a winery, a winery, have a wine tasting or by a couple of bottles of wine, if you are staying at a brewery, maybe have dinner there or try out some of the bears is kind of a Win-Win situation because the Tories can park for free and the businesses get people there to spend
money and they're buying their goods and services and just giving up space that would otherwise be sat idle when empty. So they're placing this thing in the UK is called night stops and I've only ever seen in the last couple of months and we have something around Europe corporate stocks, which is quiet, which is quite similar, but
this just looks a little bit less. You know, you don't have to sign up for anythi
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Friday Feb 04, 2022
Friday Feb 04, 2022
In today’s show, I give you a rundown onmy first Motorhome and Campervan Show of the year. I walkd around almost 20 vans, opening and closing things, checking out bathrooms and toilets, fridges and cookers.
Link below to all the videos where you can see the walk throughs.
Links to my content:
www.drivinghorizons.com
www.youtube.com/richardchubb
Social: @RichardChubUK
The transcript below is auto-generated, so apologies if it reads strangely!
It's Friday, the fourth of February, this is episode 37, and welcome back to driving Horizon's.
Hello, hello, hello and good morning. Good afternoon and good evening to whenever and wherever you are listening to this Richard here and welcome back to the podcast.
If you're new here than welcome and if you are a regular, then of course, welcome back. Well, another week has passed us by, and if you've been out and about in your vans of hope, you've had as much fun as as I did the weather last weekend, particularly for January.
On Saturday morning in particular was it was pretty spectacular on the South Coast anyway. What about 50 degrees, which doesn't sound warm for January in England? It was almost tropical.
As you probably heard from previous shows, I have been planning to go to the West Point Exeter Motor Home and camper show, which I did last weekend.
Really, really good fun. It wasn't as big as the NBC one's going to be, obviously, but that was still, I reckon, is the best part of 100 vans there on show lots and lots of motor homes and larger campervans.
And they also had a smaller selection of the V dampers in the caddies and the Ford Nuggets and other smaller brands on show as well. And what can I tell you about it? Well, I had a good nose around quite a few vans and there was no real new sort of, you know, state of the art brand
new of the production line, 2022 ideas and clever things there. This week it was all mainly second hand ones that were being resold. And on that, one thing that surprised me, I got talking to somebody from South West.
I think it was Southwest campervans or South West Motor homes, and this was about midday. Maybe now, maybe a bit later there, maybe at 2:00 on the first day, and they told me that it already sold six vans and they were expecting to do at least 20 over the weekend.
Now, bear in mind that the Friday was probably going to be the quieter day.
Maybe not, actually. Maybe people were going there to have a good look around before we got too busy. I don't know, but you know, six vans in the first four or five hours.
I think that just goes to show how much of a demand there is for the motorhomes and campervans and the whole van life and RV and whatever you want to call it, was a bit of an eye opener for me, to be honest with you, you know, thought that have come away from there hoping to sell half
a dozen over the whole weekend, let alone six in the first four hours and 20 odd 20 plus over the three days. So I think that goes to show how how in-demand these vehicles are. And if you've been doing it for now, I've done it for very long, very, very since 2017, say, four or five years we've
been doing it for. There's something that they've been doing it for decades, but there's a lot of new people going into it. So if you see something you like, I definitely suggest snapping it up because, you know, who knows how long it's going to be hanging around for?
So what can I tell you? Well, the one thing that struck me as the most as I was wandering around was how different, even slightly some of the vans and motorhomes are. You know, there doesn't seem to be one perfect layout.
I think that the the perfect layo
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Friday Jan 28, 2022
Friday Jan 28, 2022
In today's show, I briefly talk about the first Campervan and Motorhome Show of the year. I also give you a run down of all the things we definitely recommend you should pack, as they are always the first things in our 'van when we head off.
Links to my content:
www.drivinghorizons.com
www.youtube.com/richardchubb
Social: @RichardChubUK
The transcript below is auto-generated, so apologies if it reads strangely!
It's Friday, the 28th of January, this is episode 36, and welcome back to Driving Horizon's.
Hello, hello, hello, and good morning. Good afternoon and good evening to whenever or wherever you are listening to this is Richard here, and welcome back to the podcast.
If you are new here than welcome and if you are a regular, well, of course. Welcome back, I hope. As always, everyone has had a brilliant week and I've just realized I haven't got myself a glass of water, so we'll have to remedy that in a moment.
You may find me talking a little bit slower in today's podcast and hopefully also a little bit clearer because I am trying to transcribe the words on the show so that I can add words over or the transcription to my website, to the show notes, in case there are people that would like to read it, as well as listen to it or instead of listening to it. And I'm also going to try and cut out the ums, but that's the hardest thing, I think. What have we been doing this week? Not too much. I have been getting ready for the first or my first motorhome and campervan show of the year that is happening
in Exeter.
It is happening today and probably depending on when you listening to this, but certainly when the show goes live, I will be cruising along a south coast road somewhere. It's his anything up to a three-hour drive, so fingers crossed there's not too much traffic.
I think I will be spending two days at this show. The first day I will try and see as many of the motorhomes and campervans as I can because I have a feeling it will be a lot quieter on Friday than Saturday.
I would imagine that there are many children still at school, so if families are thinking of going, they will probably pick the Saturday to go. So hopefully the Friday will be a bit quieter and I can have a nose around all the campgrounds and motorhomes.
I'm not entirely sure how many new models will be there. I think a lot of those will be saved for the NBC show, the month after which we are also going to. But I'm still going to have a look around, get some ideas and try to understand a little bit more about the bigger vans.
What's the difference between our California and the bigger vans if we ever decided to upgrade to something slightly bigger? So that is what's happening in happening in next week? And stay tuned or tune in to next week's show because I will be going into everything there in a lot more detail.
I will also, perhaps I'm not sure yet, but I may flood my Twitter feed with photos and notes from the show. Have a look over on Twitter. Richard Shelby UK is the Twitter handle, I guess is the right word, and let me know.
Follow us over there for updates and bits and pieces on all things complaining. What is today's show about? Well, I think one of these almost two years ago in the summer of 2020, and we've sort of added a few things to the list, and I thought I would go through a few things that we always pack.
first, it doesn't matter where we're going, how many days we're going for or how far we're going. There are certain things that we always put in the campervan first, so I'm going to grab myself a glass of water.
Stay tuned. And I will r
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Friday Jan 21, 2022
Friday Jan 21, 2022
In this show, I talk about the things to consider when buying your first campervan.
I chat about the size of the van, storage, number of seats, and what might be best for you.
This is after owning a campervan for over 5 years, and perhaps about to embark on a new purchase.
If you would like to see the Blog Post, then Click Here to read!
Transcript (Auto Generated so apologies for any mistakes)
It's Friday, the 21st of May, this is episode 35, and welcome back to driving Horizon's.
Hello, hello, hello and a good morning, a good afternoon and good evening to whenever or wherever you are listening to this Richard here.
And welcome back to the podcast. If you are new here than welcome and if you are a regular, then welcome back. It's been a quiet week. This week we haven't really been too far.
We've been spending some time just planning our February trip really.
And well, if you don't know where we are heading off to the Lake District, but we are doing something a bit different. We have a camper van, as I have no doubt you are aware, but we are hiring something a little bit bigger with a view to perhaps changing our VW California in the future.
So more on that in the future, and it will all be documented over on the YouTube channel. I'm sure I'll mention it here in February at some point as well. And that got me thinking, and you know, what we want to change are our van and what do we what we really want to make it perfect for
us.
I think it crossed my mind for about 1,000,000,000th of a second to build our own. But I have neither the time and most importantly, needs the skills, so we're not going to do that. So we are going to look to get something as close as we want to achieve what we want to have off the off
the shelf, if you like. But it got me thinking that it can be quite an overwhelming process to, you know, to buy a motoring or camper van is a lot of money to spend how it's going to be right?
Have you really thought of everything you're going to do with it, how you're going to use it, where you're going to go, how it's going to fit into your life, your lifestyle, your family? Your day to day comings and goings, if you like, so he could be thinking I would write down everything that we should think about
. And of course, one thing led to another and it turned into a blog post over on driving horizons dot com. Check out the website over there and you'll see that as one of the most recent posts, and I thought that that would be a great subject for this week's podcast.
Have a quick chat and to give you my thoughts on what we need to think about when buying a camper van for the first time. There is so much to consider. There are so many choices out there, so many different alternatives.
There's a lot of money to spend. Choosing the right one and getting it as close to perfect, if not perfect as possible, is is going to be your main aim. So I don't want to call it a buying guide because it is in by put together this little guy that's that's over on the website that I'm going
to run through quickly here. I'm going to try and again, as always, keep it to a 15 or 20 minutes, but there is so much to think about, so I'm not going to waste any more time offering I am going to crack on with it.
For anyone who's buying a camper van, especially for the first time, this podcast is not really going to tell you what camper van is right for you. What it will do, however, is it's going to give you something to think about and hopefully some things to consider that you may know or things to think about that you
may not have considered. And that would be an option or an issue or even crossed your mind. So as I said in previous fire podcasts and in var
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Friday Jan 14, 2022
Friday Jan 14, 2022
Welcome to this week's show, where I give you a load of great tips for when you are visiting your next Caravan, RV and Motorhome Shows
Another year is upon us. We are presented with a whole slew of Caravan and Motorhome shows to choose from.
Don't forget, that I am visiting a couple of Shows in the next 6 weeks. There will be a lot of videos coming up. Head over to the YouTube channel to subscribe. Why not be the first to see all my videos from the Motorhome Show?
It can be quite daunting, so we decided to put together our Top Tips for attending Caravan and Motorhome Shows. RV Shows if you are from across the pond.
They are dotted all around the country. From down in the West Country in Devon, for instance, as far north as York.
Here is the list of 2022 Shows if you are interested. And if you are looking to book a Campsite near one of the shows, perhaps these Websites will help.
If you are going to one, and perhaps haven’t been to one before, it may be a bit overwhelming. As a result, we have put together this comprehensive list to help.
Buying a Campervan, Motorhome or Caravan is quite an investment. As a result, it may also be a good idea to hire one first?
There is a lot of information in this podcast, and all of our tips for motorhome shows can be found in a blog post over on the blog, which you can find by clicking here.
If you want to see a list of all the UK Shows in 2022, then you can find this here.
Also, don't forget to review the Podcast on your favourite platform!
Thanks for listening. Rich
Links to my content:www.drivinghorizons.comwww.youtube.com/@drivinghorizonsSocial: @drivinghorizons

Friday Jan 07, 2022
Friday Jan 07, 2022
Welcome to this week's podcast, when I chat about some of our travel plans for 2022.
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Friday Dec 24, 2021
Friday Dec 24, 2021
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Friday Dec 17, 2021
Friday Dec 17, 2021
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
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Friday Dec 10, 2021
Friday Dec 10, 2021
In this week's episode, we visit East Devon and check out some great sights and things to do around the area. We also take a short trip to Arne, in Dorset, and there is a quick update on the channel's future.
YouTube - www.youtube.com/richardchubb
Transcription of Podcast - Auto-Generated so apologies for any weird words!!
Hello, everybody. It's Friday, December the 10th, this is episode 30, and welcome back to the podcast. Hello, hello, hello and good morning, good afternoon or good evening to whenever and wherever you are listening to this podcast today, it is great to have you welcome.
If you're new here. Welcome. And if you are returning visitor and welcome back, it's great to have all of you and welcome to the show is another Friday. Another week has gone by and as you may know, I am still catching up on talking about all the things I've done over the past few months.
Today, I'm going to talk about a couple of things that we have done in September with the help of my photo library, because that is how I kind of track and remind myself where I've been and what we did.
So I'm going to be flicking between screens. If you hear the odd click, that will be why. What if you are new here, then what is this podcast all about? Well, it is about mainly UK travel and largely in our camper van is done in conjunction with my website, Richard dot com, and also with the few videos
that I put out over on YouTube, which is YouTube.com forward slash Richard Chubb. And this week I've made a bit of a decision to really focus on. They're going to stick with UK travel, but I'm really going to concentrate on the campervan side of things and you know, it's tough to get out all the time with a
family and school and things like that. So I'm going to be doing a little mini trips, possibly on my own day trips out in the van, sharing tips and tricks that I do when I'm out and about and talking about the gear that I use and any tips or advice I can think of.
So if you are a campervan lover, you have definitely come to the right place. If you are just generally a travel lover again, you're in the right place, particularly if that is UK. And if you have some weird fascination with listening to a strange person talk, then you are also in the right place.
So we are going to quickly jump to watch a bit of a catch up to take take you around a few places because one, we did a trip in September that it was only one trip, but we got to see lots and lots.
So let us transport you on an adventure to East Devon. We had three nights in a campsite called Oak Down Tauren Park or I think is Oak Down Touring and Holiday Park something like that? Really good campsites. It's got a great some great facilities there.
Nice big, spacious pitches, award winning according to all the signs they've got everywhere around the park. And so it was a great campsite, great for the kids. There was a play park and a, you know, golf like a little pitch and thing and, you know, nearby lots of places to see which I'll get into.
And we it took us about two and a half hours to get there from the new forest. We headed out west to East Devon and we stopped at Lyme Regis first and foremost, which is a great little beach side of COVI type.
And there's not really a cove, actually. It's a sort of pebble shingle, beach fishing, lots of fishing boats hanging around and the usual beachside attractions, kayaks and trampoline and things like that. We had lunch in the van and took a walk along the beach as a as a little break up of the journey, and then we got
tied down and parked up on a pitch. That was it was very nice. It was very spacious. We were obviously a few tents and camper vans that obviously had come together. He had never quite sure what to expect, but everything was fine.
They were respectful. We wasn't noisy. The noise and more
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Friday Dec 03, 2021
Friday Dec 03, 2021
Welcome to this weeks podcast, where I am continuing to recap on our 2021 travels, catching up from when the Podcast was off line.
In todays Episode:
Exbury Gardens - We visit a Falconry Display
Swanage & Corfe - We take a trip on a Steam Train, and visit Corfe Castle
Weymouth - We enjoy an inflatable water park on a lake, and blast around the Jurassic Coast on Jetskis
Beaulieu - We camp at a CAMC pop up campsite, and spend a day at the National Motor Museum
Concierge Camping - And finally we camp at one of the best campsites in the UK, but not without its complications!
Don't forget to subscribe to the show, and get in touch if you have anything to share, suggest or say!
Transcript of Podcast
**Please note Transcriptions are Automatically Generated so may not be perfect
0:00
Hello it is Friday the third of December This is episode 29 and welcome back to the podcast
0:18
Hello hello hello and good morning good afternoon and good evening to wherever and whenever you are.
Welcome back to the show we should hear and it is great to see or to have all of your ears for the next 10 or 15 minutes or so. If you're new here welcome if you been here before, welcome back and you may or may not know what this podcast is all about. It is trying to share with you all the trips we take in some great parts of the UK that you can visit and you may have heard of and you want to know a bit more about or perhaps places that you've never even heard of that sound interesting to you.
I seem to be getting my tongue in a twist today so bear with me but we are going to crack on or what I'm doing for the rest of 2021 as our travellers kind of slow down a little bit and things are happening at weekends and Christmas is coming and all sorts of things like that we may not be getting to some places that we want to go to but that will that will change but we have been to a lot of places the podcast was down for a few months and I'm just catching up on our previous travels that we've done through the year.
You may have caught last week's show when we visited Marwell zoo and Activity Centre The Isle of Wight and lonely safari park well today I am going to briefly take you to a falconry display on a steam train in Swanage. Some fun that we had in Weymouth. We also went camping to Bewley motorhome museum where the caravan and motorhome club did a pop up campsite and we also went to concierge camping and depending on how long I ramble on for, we may save a couple of these for next week's podcast because there is only a couple of things I have to talk about next week. So we may defer one of those but let's see how we get on. So we've recently been to Chichester was our wedding anniversary last week and we celebrated our 10 year anniversary in a beautiful town or city is it I'm not sure of Chichester, there's a cathedral there.
So it could be a city where there what there was there is some nice bars and coffee shops and a couple of restaurants we went to there for two nights we were Max free. I'm not sure if I mentioned this in last week's podcast. But I will cover that in more detail perhaps over the next week or two. So let me just crack on with a quick catch up of where we've been in the summer of 2021. So we started off this, this show if you like with a trip to X Ray Now X ray Gardens, which you're going to hear about again soon in a couple of weeks. Because we did I also went to a Halloween event now because really cool. There's a video over on my YouTube channel about that day it was really good fun. But this time we went there when we're friends of X ray members, which means we get to go we pay an annual fee and we can go as many times as we want while it's open and closed for a couple of months in a winter. But i
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