Want to know more about what we get up to on our caravan holidays during 2010? This is our personal caravan holiday blog - keep reading to have a laugh ...

Well, we haven't been caravanning for a while due to commitments at home but are looking forward to the summer holidays.

During this week we received the following very intriguing e-mail:

”I'm Sammy from Jam. We're working with The Sun and we'd love you to get involved in The £9.50 Holiday Challenge.

Starting on Saturday, we are going to be giving away vouchers that allow our readers to go away on holiday from £9.50, in both the UK and around Europe.

Our challenge to you is to buy something more exciting with £9.50 than a fabulous holiday. "It can't be done!" I hear you cry; it's your task to prove us wrong. You'll have to work hard though: perhaps there's a caravanning essential that you can buy for £9.50? But, you only have one week to buy it!

Are you up to the challenge? We'll send you £9.50 to give the challenge a go.

For more info, pop over to www.thesun.co.uk/holidays.

Do you think we can do it? Do you have an idea of a really exciting item we could buy? I am sure we can win! We will show all those non-caravanning people out there that caravanning doesn’t have to be boring and is only for old people!!

Keep looking out for more posts to see what we eventually buy – we already have some ideas!!

20th July

After agreeing to take up the £9.50 challenge, we all got our thinking caps on. This was going to be difficult! What could be more exciting than getting a holiday for just £9.50? But, after several hours of talking over ideas, we were beginning to wish that we had never accepted the challenge!

However, later that evening one of us had a “EUREKA!” moment! As we run a successful website called www.caravan-advice.co.uk and are caravan maniacs, why don’t we try and buy a caravan for £9.50???? Was that possible?? Were we suffering from sunstroke?? But, the more we thought about it, the better the idea became. Just imagine if we could pull this off!

But where do we start? We tried looking on Ebay and it seems everyone wants to buy caravans at the moment and the prices were rocketing!! Who invented the “Staycation” and made caravans cool??! Then we had a brainwave, we would go and see our local caravan dealer where we buy our own caravans from – perhaps they would be able to help us with our huge task as they are always willing to go the extra mile for their customers (if possible!!).

Saturday came and we went to see Graham at M & M Leisure (www.mmleisure.co.uk) in Haverhill in Suffolk. We spoke to Graham, explained the challenge to him and you should have seen his face when we said we wanted to buy a caravan for £9.50!! We explained further and said that we didn’t want a brand new, up to the minute 2011 model – just the oldest caravan sitting on their forecourt looking a little sad for itself and which had definitely seen better days!!

Graham phoned us back the next day and said he thought he had found what we were looking for. We have no idea what the caravan is like but are so excited about doing it up. Pictures will be posted on here of Bessie as soon as we have them!!

We have some great ideas about what to do with Bessie (pictures courtesy of www.happylovesrosie.co.uk). It’s going to be our little home on wheels with all the comforts we need.

We are so excited about our new little caravan – we can now have lots of holidays throughout the year – not just one! We have even given it a name – Bessie !!

The world is our oyster – where shall we go with Bessie today? It’s our own little home by the sea, the forest, abroad, at home – the choice is ours alone but it could be yours too.

No more controlling hotel and airport rules and times – only freedom to do what we want when we want.

Pets can go too! No more extremely sad doggies having to visit the kennels and you missing them too. Our dog comes everywhere with us and has a whale of a time. We have seen caravanners with cats, birds and even rabbits!!!

Try it – if you don’t enjoy it just sell everything on Ebay and go back to collecting your £9.50 Sun tokens!!

Nigel & Karen

We very nearly didn't visit the caravan as it was raining lots on the Thursday before we left and we thought we wouldn't be able to get out and about much. But, we are so glad we did as the weather was extremely good – it was even hot enough for t-shirts!! Any rain we had was usually at night and cleared early in the morning so out and about we ventured! We walked for miles along the beaches which Becky the dog thoroughly enjoyed!

This is the view of our campsite from one of our many walks around the Norfolk countryside.

We also decided to have a go at "Geocaching" as we had been sent an e-mail asking us to put a link on our website to the Geocaching website. We had a look and decided this looked like lots of fun and was a way of making walks more interesting. If you haven't heard of Geocaching before, have a look at www.geocaching.com as it gives you all the information you need.

We bought a cheap handheld GPS, which you will need to go Geocaching, put in the co-ordinates and off we set to seek our first Geocache! We trudged for what seemed like miles but the GPS said we were getting nearer! We came to the top of the hill and it said we had gone past the cache – where was it? We re-traced our steps and with the help of the clue which we had earlier downloaded from the website, we managed to find it. We wondered why we had never seen any of these "caches" before when walking about?! Right, that was it – we were hooked!!

Over the week we went Geocaching five times and managed to find three of the caches. We will continue next time we visit!

Ben and Nigel were invited to "Go Ape" for a day and what an exciting day they had! This is what it says about Go Ape on their website:

"It's not in the dictionary, but if it was, Go Ape would be described as a 'high-wire forest adventure'. That means we build giant obstacle courses up in the trees using ladders, walkways, bridges and tunnels made of wood, rope and super-strong wire, and top it all off with the country’s best zip lines. We then kit people out with harnesses, pulleys and karabiners, give them a 30 minute safety briefing and training and let them loose into the forest canopy, free to swing through the trees. Of course, instructors are always on hand, regularly patrolling the forests (not in monkey suits unfortunately!) The result is spectacular. The Go Ape experience gets the adrenalin pumping, gets people out of their comfort zones and above all (no pun intended), it's just great fun."

Have a look at the pictures of the "Apes" below:

We also visited Norwich to hit the shops! It was rather difficult though with a dog in tow as Becky's not that keen on shopping!! If you haven't visited Norwich before, then go take a look. There are so many good shops as well as places to visit and see.

All too soon it was time to come home as Ben had a football match plus we had plenty of washing to catch up on!

We are already looking forward to next time ...

We actually had a relatively peaceful weekend as we were child-free! Georgia was away for the weekend doing a Duke of Edinburgh trip somewhere in the New Forest and Ben was staying at his friends house as he had an important football match on Sunday. We had the dog to keep us company though!!

We didn’t do alot over the weekend – we just relaxed and took it easy! We had a look around Sheringham at some of the little shops. The steam trains were running as usual and looked great in the sunshine.

Here’s a picture of our caravan and the wonderful views we wake up to in the mornings!!

Roll on next time we visit ...

Well, it's that time of year again and we are cleaning our caravan and loading it up ready for the off! The caravan site opens around mid-March so we will soon be towing our caravan to North Norfolk for fun again!

If you read our previous blogs you will know that we have had some "damp trouble" with our caravan. Our caravan has now visited the dealers and luckily, the damp problem wasn't as bad as was first thought. We didn't have to have the whole back panel replaced – only the awning rail had to be replaced and re-sealed. Hopefully, that's the end of that problem!

Last weekend we visited the National Boat & Caravan Show at the NEC in Birmingham. We had a great day looking at all the caravans, motorhomes, tents and accessories. There were some amazing caravans and motorhomes – good job we left our cheque book at home! If you haven't been to one of these shows you really must as it's such a good day out – have a look at our Caravan Shows page to see what's coming up soon.