Stick in the mud
VW Caravelle £45,540 OTR/£52,606 as tested
Photographic evidence, praise be, is lacking, but I’ve always found confession cathartic. I got the Caravelle stuck in a muddy feld. It was a fairly undignifed episode, not least for my cocky overconfdence that winter tyres would be just the thing for brown gloop and, while I managed to avoid falling headlong into it, my wife’s perfectly timed dose of throttle in reverse while I was pushing at the front bumper delivered much the same result, and possibly even more hilarity for those the other side of the windscreen.
The fnal act was to be dragged out backwards by a Defender like some useless fy-tipped white good (the green van in the picture is our friend’s Vee Dub, which sufered a similar fate). It turns out there are 2,416 reasons why a front-drive LWB Caravelle is the wrong weapon to aim across a muddy, mole-hilled paddock at a target the width of a fve-bar gate.
That afternoon, to restore some honour, I got the Caravelle valeted. The bloke quoted £20, opened a sliding door, gulped, and added another tenner. Still a bargain. It had been an eventful weekend. This all happened on Sunday, while on the Saturday it had shuttled six boys for a day of water fumes and picnics in the New Forest. Or, to express it another way, wet towels followed by muddy trousers.
Oh, I know it looks like good, clean, fun in the pictures, but it’s hard to reach for a camera when you’re plucking someone else’s child from the river and trying to summon another down from the upper reaches of a spruce. And you thought my life just involved skidding supercars around race tracks.
But I love the Caravelle. Not only did it shrug of all the accumulated muck, but the boys all declared it far more fun than a Land Rover Discovery. Well, until it took 45 minutes to extract from a feld.