It’s clear from our online membership of various motorhoming blogs and communities (only a handful, please note – we’re not that sad) that winter – with it’s short days and challenging temperatures – doesn’t prevent many of our kind from continuing to travel around the UK, Europe or even further beyond.

However, with family and social commitments (plus one cat, two hens and a pond full of perpetually-ravenous, heron-defiant goldfish) at home, our own Knumptying tends to be seasonal, closing down over the winter months when the Knumptywagen stands mute, idle and forlorn at the back of our house. To offset the wholly misplaced and slight sense of guilt this imparts, we do our best to ensure it’s occasionally plugged-in to mains electricity; that its water tanks and cute little central heating boiler are fully drained and once in a while we move it just so the tyres don’t take on a ‘set’ from supporting its passive 3.5 tonnes. (Yeah, I know – in a prevous blog we were going to jack it up for the winter – but a bout of abject laziness and dark nights intervened to ensure that didn’t actually happen.)

So, as the daily arrival of dusk now becomes perceptibly later each week, we begin to emerge from Knumpty-torpor and set about planning our first trip of the ‘new’ season. Coincidentally with our annual habitation service*, we find ourselves booking a couple of nights at a trout-fishery-with-camp-site not too far from home, as a means of reawakening our slightly parochial wanderlust. Since that episode is still a future-prospect, it will hopefully feature in a following blog, along with photographs of fine, gleaming freshly-caught and beautifully-patterned fish.

Which leads me to the well-buried point of this particular re-emergence into Knumptytravel blogdom: photography.

Many fellow-bloggers illustrate their posts with selections of fine photographs to enliven and support the word-count and illustrate what it is they’re actually writing about. From the outset, I’ve always felt that a blog should be primarily and descriptively word-based and as such have striven to select just one ‘headline’ photo for each entry – a task which can prove a challenge in itself, as we always seem to have so much in the way of raw-material, thanks to the ubiquity of smart-phone cameras.

I’ve also been trying to work-up a suitably emotive description to justify this strategy and was therefore delighted to come across a beautifully simple piece within the pages of author John Le Carré’s recent best-seller, ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ which is unashamedly plagiarised here – since it crystallises our approach towards use of the image and the written-word: “Cameras don’t work for me. When I write a note, my memory stores the thought. When I take a photograph, the camera steals my job.”

So, to maintain our current word-prioritised ethos, Her Worshipful Chief Map-Reading Chef And Trout-Piking-Meister has managed to penetrate the online mystery which is Instagram and assumed responsibility for posting a suitable and separate selection of photos to support, enhance and illustrate our travels, without detracting from the essential wordiness of the Knumptytravel blog. And, since we enjoy a certain degree of quirky uniqueness with the ‘Knumpty’ brand, you can find her posts (so I’m told) by simply keying ‘knumptytravel’ into Instagram’s seach facility. Hopefully that will provide readers with two bites of the same cherry, or more colloquially, a double-whammy of words and pictures where neither detracts or distracts from the other. Please feel free to ‘follow’ both and share the mileage of our future Knumptying !

*For the uninitated, a habitation service is both recommended and advisable (although not a legally-enforcable requirement) as an annual check of one’s motorhome (i.e. the bit we live in.) Thus any potential damp-incursion; worn seals; broken thingummyjigs; exterior bodywork; electrics, bottled-gas and water provisions are all visually inspected and safety-checked for peace-of-mind and efficiency during the intensive usage they’re about to receive during the new season, the new day. There. Now you know.