The most part of our stay in Winnipeg was based around acquiring the newest part of our ‘outfit’ – may we introduce Frankie Junior.

At 28’ Frankie was already a large van by UK standards, (although of course over here we are tiny!) so you may be wondering why the need to extend. The main reason (apart from wanting to keep up with the monster vans over here) was our poor bikes balanced on the back of the van.

It takes John the best part of ¾ hr. to put the bikes onto the bike rack every time we move on which sort of leads to situations where if we are just doing a one or two nighter we are reluctant to get them off.

The other thing is that the road dust and grit are doing the bikes no good at all. And we are bored of having to clean them every time we get them off to get them going again. They also rub against each other which is causing a lot of damage.

That and the fact that our ‘well stocked’ boot is such a feat of engineering you have to take out box 1 to get to box 2 etc. etc. Not a problem for a few weeks ‘holidaying’ but as we now well past that the novelty is slightly wearing off in terms of packing, setting up and repacking etc.

So we have bought an 8’ trailer, which John has cleverly kitted out with bike racks so we can literally roll them in and out on the nifty ramp door. We’ve hung our bike paraphernalia on the walls of the trailer, the fishing rods have their own nifty little racks and tucked at the back the generator (which we’ve not used as yet) and the box of ‘spare stuff’ that we don’t need access to on a daily (or even weekly) basis.

Result is that the bikes go in and out in a matter of minutes, the kids can get them out themselves, the boot is now down a few boxes so everything is easy to reach and the boot now opens without having to ‘tilt’ the bike rack!! Most importantly set up and pack up times have been reduced, which is great.

We are of course now significantly longer. Think we measure in at 39’, which sounds big, but we are still the baby on the block out here. So we hope it isn’t going to affect our choice of campsite or pitch. Every campsite we’ve been to so far has had huge pitches. We’ve often moved when we arrived at a site to a pitch they wouldn’t let us book on line as it said we were too big for it. So we think we’ll be fine.

We are very pleased with Frankie Junior and the time savings it brings. So we are trying to get used to the slight reduction in fuel efficiency and our ability to climb hills – luckily we are still in the Prairies so that isn’t too much of an issue yet. We’ll let you know how we fare once we get to the Rockies!!