*sings* "My name is Talulah..."

squeaky is a bad blogger. *shame*
i haven't blogged for far, far too long, i know.  but honestly, there hasn't been much going on.  there appears to be something growing out of the silt which is, at present, about 11,000 words long.  it's coming very, very slowly.  and i keep hitting walls with "OK, smartass, what happens next, then?" scrawled all over them in dripping red paint.
but it's coming.  the working title is utterly crap, and there's already a lot that needs poking, but i still have a connection with it, and ideas for what happens later (without any idea of how i'm going to get from here to there), but it's coming.... :)

-

and now, since the end appears to be in sight, the sad and terrible story of Isobel, our poor, abused camper.

Isobel has been with us for about four years.  and we love her.  she has given us much joy (and occasional frustration - like the first time her sliding door fell off, but never mind that), and has been astonishingly reliable.  she's carried hubby to work every day, and he and i all over the country to watch ravens, and wolves (the latter only in a safari park, sadly), and long, long walks in deserted woodlands, and so many other places.  she has been a true and faithful friend.  but she was getting rusty.  so we decided to give her a new set of clothes (i.e. a new paint job), and get a few things repaired and spruced up.
we took her to a local place, which shall remain nameless (insert copious and acidic swearing here), as they were VW refurbishment specialists, and the work they showed us looked pretty good.  they quoted us a price we could afford for replacing panels, getting rid of the rust, taking her back to the bare metal and respraying, and we saved hard for several months.
she was to be purple on the outside, and we were going to redo her insides in green.
she went in at the beginning of november, and was supposed to be in there for four weeks.
six weeks later (we didn't mind waiting, these things take time, after all), we finally got her back.  it was two days before christmas, and the spanking new purple paint was a fantastic christmas present.  we were thrilled!  yay! :D

five weeks later, it all went tits up.

rust started showing through the new paint.  not just a little patch, either -  all over the bloody place!  we were horrified!

we took her back and showed the guy who runs the garage, and he gave every appearance of also being horrified at the shoddy work.  apparently, the reason it had taken six weeks was that "Dave The Paint" (the sprayer who does all of their paintwork for them) had been having one or two personal problems when he did Isobel's work.  really?  no shit!
well anyway, we were very understanding - people do have problems, after all - and garage bloke said he'd get it sorted, at no extra cost to us.  too bloody right!
so off she went again.  i will leave out the description of the shitty fucking deathtrap car he loaned us, or what a nightmare we had getting temporary insurance for it, or any of the myriad other things that happened, each one sinking our spirits lower and lower.
we missed out on our first week's leave this year, and the second. 
THREE MONTHS after we took her in for the second time, the work still had not even been started.  apparrently, DTP was very angry that we had dared to complain about his dreadful, shoddy work.  go figure - we're so ungrateful.  *shrug*
we finally demanded that garage guy return Isobel, and the money we'd paid him.  the cheeky bastad tried to give us 900 quid less, saying work had been done on the body of the van.  hubby, on the verge of tears of anger, frustration and sorrow, pointed out that she was now in a worse state than when she went in.  her door locks no longer worked, the speaker cables had been carelessly cut when they removed the doors, all the interior window trims had disappeared, and the rust was even worse, with paint flaking off all over the bloody place.
he returned Isobel and, a couple of weeks later, we finally got all of the money back, but were now faced with the question: "What now?"  find somewhere else that would charge us even more and be just as likely to rip us off?
Why bother now?
i can't adequately convey the trauma of this whole story here.  she was our pride and joy, and those scumbags had fucking RUINED her.  she no longer had that spirit of joy that made us relax as soon as we sat in her.  she was, to us, a flat, dead thing.  a moving cavern of metal, and nothing more.
we decided the time had come.
we were ready. 
"we shall buy a bay window". 
one of the ones you see all over the roads of Cornwall in the summer.  a proper VW bus.  not a splitty (the really old ones with the split windscreen), since they're really, really expensive.  but we worked out that we could just about afford a bay window, with a pop top.
so we started searching the interwebz.
there's a place we found down in Oxfordshire.   they buy and sell and do up campers, and they do really, really good work, on site (bonus!).  but they were a little out of our price range.  so we started trawling through the classified ads on vwcampercrazy.com.
we saw a few we liked, and even went to look at one (which was pink! XD), but there was one ad that really caught our eye.  however, we couldn't get hold of the guy, and the ad was a couple of weeks old.  we thought it might already have gone, since the good ones tend to go really quickly, but a week later, the guy finally got back to us.  it was still for sale, and he was happy to keep it for us until we could get to see her.
yesterday, we drove all the way down to essex (three hours!), just to see it, hoping against hope that it wouldn't be a wasted 360 mile round trip.

it wasn't.

we've found her!  we've found our new baby!

***HAPPYDANCE***

her name is Talulah, and she's GORGEOUS!!!

look-->

her bodywork is immaculate, without a speck of rust anywhere (apart from a teeny tiny patch on the passanger footwell - easily sorted), and her interior is fantastically well designed, hand built, and, again, immaculate.  i should probably mention that the paint job and interior were both done by the lovely guy that's selling her to us, and quite obviously with a great deal of love.

she is a dream!

now we will be on tenterhooks for two weeks until we can pick her up.

WE CAN'T WAIT!!!

and poor, abused Isobel?  she's going to a new home, where she will be loved and appreciated.  she's going to go and live with The Most Wonderful Woman In The World and her lovely chap.  this makes us happy, too.

*smile*

.