Wedding belle
REPORT 4 1968cc, 4cyl bi-turbodiesel, FWD, 178bhp, 295lb ft 37.2mpg, 199g/km CO2
0–62mph in 12.4secs, 117mph 3000kg £ £49,214/£58,834 Total mileage 7451 Driver Ollie Marriage Why it’s here Is this camper worth two decades of holidays in Spain?
y cousin was getting married in a remote part of France. I could have fown to Toulouse with my family, got a hire car, spent a couple of nights in some anonymous chain hotel and forked out for a taxi to get us home after the reception.
But instead we came up with a better (albeit more time-consuming) plan: take the California, spend a couple of days wildcamping our way south, then park up at the reception venue, where the Cali was able to double as a children’s crèche and, later on, as an on-site crash pad for their parents.
There was no concern about the children wandering of, as the California has its own force feld that prevents them escaping. Such is the pull of the camper’s interior and all its neat features (especially if you plug a laptop in and put Frozen on repeat in the upstairs dormitory) that, once inside, children simply don’t want to come out. Not even when a French huf-puf band honks past outside.
As it turned out, the Cali had a third role to perform that evening: ambulance. The heli-drone videoing the venue from above managed, in a ft of wasp-like fury, to lacerate its own pilot. This being France, no frst-aid kit
Mcould be located, not even in the château kitchen. Luckily the Cali comes with a wellstocked pouch of medi-goodies, which the inevitable doctor on the guest list used to staunch the bleeding.
It was just another thing this most adaptable of vehicles took in its stride. It hasn’t, however, escaped the experience of life on the TopGear feet completely unscathed. In addition to the scrape on the passenger’s door trim and the broken seat rake-adjuster cap, we managed to lose the water-tank cap and put a scratch in the roof when I opened the tailgate while the lid was raised and one of the bike handlebars took a nibble out of the paintwork. But that’s the thing: because you live in it, basically use it as your house, it’s susceptible to many more kinds of damage than a regular car. Irritating, but not nearly enough to take the shine of it.