We're back from our second outing in the trailer tent and we had a wonderful time. The trailer tent was brilliant and despite the catalogue of incidents sent to try us we had a really good weekend.

We went away in a large extended family group consisting of Grandparents (in a tent) and 3 sibling families (the caravanners, us in our trailer tent and the campers). The incidents started before we even left home.

1. The caravanner's main towcar failed it's MOT in the week before we were due to go away. It's a US import and so replacement parts are neither easy to get nor cheap so they were left having to tow their caravan with their far smaller 2nd car, luckily there were no hills to negotiate.
2. The camper's people carrier broke down the weekend before and was in the garage being mended on the Friday we were going away. It's their only car with a towbar, to tow the trailer with all their camping gear in. It didn't make it so they came up in their other car with as much stuff as possible shoved in the back and having to borrow a smaller tent from the Grandparents. Who had taken it just in case.
3. When we arrived and started putting up the trailer tent we found that we had broken a plastic clip on the ridge poles, which are rather fundemental. Luckily we have lots of spares which, after a little whittling, fitted and we were OK again.
4. On Saturday morning Grandma realised that her purse was missing. The caravanners and Grandparents had arrived Friday lunchtime and while working out where best to pitch (the caravan was on an EHU but there not really enough room for the rest of us around them) Grandma put her purse down ... somewhere. Fast forward to Saturday morning and Grandma's purse is nowhere to be found, a forensic take down of their car yielded nothing and it wasn't at reception. Just as we were contemplating taking tents down to check whether it was under one the caravanners wandered over purse in hand, it was in the boot of their car.
5. After returning the purse the caravanners tell us during the night a pigeon had got into their awning and manged to get stuck between the awning and the inner requiring some major un-pegging in the early hours to free it.
6. Earlier on Saturday morning the camper's 4 year old emerged from their tent desperate for a wee and being a 4 year old boy he just went on the grass directly outside their tent door, the same patch of grass that his dad had left shoes on.
7. The same 4 year old later decided it would be good to play in the footwell of their car, after 5 extremely frantic minutes where half the campsite is alerted to a missing child situation he was discovered by Grandma (the third person to look in the car where he is hiding) only because she spotted his hat and then noticed he was still attached to it.
8. After an uneventful Saturday we all settled down to a nice nights sleep, until around 1 am when the thunderstorms started.  The lightening was lighting up the tents and the rain was so loud I couldn't sleep. The storms continued until around 4 am. The kids obviously all slept through them without stirring but all of the adults were glad to get back to sleep.
9. Sunday morning and the Grandparents and campers were first up, not wanting to wake us by uising our cooker to make tea they put the kettle on in the campers borrowed tent (borrowed from the Grandparents). They lit the gas and a flame shot out of the hose attachment on the stove, luckily it was extinguished pretty quickly and the kettle was boiled on a little single ring stove instead.
10. We packed everything up and headed off only for me to notice my phone was missing about 10 miles down the road, we rang it but couldn't hear it in the car, so called the Grandparents who hadn't left the site yet and they had a search around to no avail. It turned up after we got home in my clothes bag.
11. In the final 3 miles as we were getting close to home our trailer tent started to creak loudly as we went around the corners and roundabouts, when we got home the brake seemed to be on, I am pretty sure it had been off when we left so I need to investigate what's going on with that, I'll report back in another post.

As I say despite (or perhaps because of) all of the above we all had a brilliant time, is it the things which go wrong that make camping enjoyable? Perhaps it's the fish and chips - cor they were good.