Caravans... why?!

Caravans have always bemused me. I have never been able to fathom why somebody would want to spend a relatively considerable amount of money on a tiny, cramped, smelly house they can tow around behind them.

Campervans are not much better, though slightly more understandable, depending on the context of their use. I know a few surfers who use them... but that is purely so they can spend more time surfing. Theirs is a surfing lifestyle, not a caravaners lifestyle.

Most people would think I am a typical driver who hates following the meandering lines of caravans through Devon's roads... and I am, but I am not really complaining about the never-ending procession of sluggish neo-troglodytes wending their way through the beautiful countryside... or at least it was beautiful, until some smoking monstrosity towing a white lump of garbage turns up to smog up the place. What I am complaining about is the lifestyle caravaners have chosen fro themselves.

See, what they will do is drive across the country to a field that is filled with more smelly white boxes and park up. Then they will proceed to set up, hooking up their water, if there is such a thing where they have chosen, putting out an awning perhaps, some uncomfortable folding chairs and then cook themselves a lukewarm meal of food poisoning on their ineffectual gas burners. This they will then do for x number of days, until it is time to pack it all away and go home again.

The drawbacks with this kind of holiday are many and we all know what they are, I am sure. But the main puzzle for me is why you would spend anything from £4000 to £20,000 on a caravan in the first place? If you go for the luxury model, you are spending enough money that, if you chose to put that money in a bank account in the first place you would have enough money (and the interest too) to get yourself at the very least nice bed and breakfast joints for the next ten years worth of holidays... and for the top whack you'd probably have enough to pay for some very nice foreign holidays in very nice hotels where they will do all the cooking for you and you don't have to empty your own bog.

I do feel it is about time caravaners explained themselves...