Our First Day Of Nothing

This morning I was up at 6:30am and people were already packing up. To most people here this was the last day of their long weekend and they had to be back to work tomorrow. To us, we had survived a bank holiday weekend on a campsite in Africa. Fortunately we had a nice campsite with respectful people.
Ellie got up around 7:30pm and then the people next to us packed up there caravan and then came around to say goodbye. We’ve only waved at each other in passing so you’d never get that at an English campsite.
At 11am we were bored so decided to head out to the outdoor warehouse to see if we could get some bits to finally sort this awning out before our next trip. Echo were never going to get back to us.
At the outdoor warehouse we brought 6 25mm C-clips and 2 adjustable awning poles for £25. Then we popped into the crazy store and brought 6 tennis balls. After the crazy store we went to the builders warehouse and got a hacksaw.
Back at camp we used our new central pole that we brought at the beginning of the trip and left that where it was. We cut up one of the new awning poles into 20 and 15cm lengths put a C clip on one end and cut a cross in 6 tennis balls and pushed the sharp end of the cut length without the C clip on into the tennis ball.
Then starting with our new middle pole I attached the C clip to that and pushed the end with the tennis ball into the awning. We did this on 4 of the awning roof struts and this made the awning tight and because one cut length was shorter it angled the roof so water will run off. This is a genius cheap and effective fix for us and looking in the Echo Chobe Facebook group everyone has had to do it. We are pleased with the fix.
For the rest of the day we did nothing except mooch around camp until 4:30pm when I lit the Braai. By 6pm we were left with just 4 other campers nearby and couldn’t wait to get dinner and washing up done so we could get into the caravan at 8pm, watch TV and finally get a decent nights sleep with car alarms going off and kids waking us up.
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