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Hi Katy
we tried bringing one of the cupboard doors to the Valspar desk in B&Q to get a colour match – it’s quite tricky as there’s a kind of metallic sheen to the surface that confused the colour-matching computer! The shade we ended up with was close-ish but not an exact match. They can sell you quite a small tester pot (from memory it was less than £10) so it’s not the end of the world if you don’t like it
Chris & Susan
Here’s an extra article which I don’t think was included in the original selection of PDFs. A preview from Oct 2003 of the Exsis before its official launch.
Massive thanks to Barry for all you’ve done, and massive thanks to Chris and Amanda for taking over… what a fantastic community.
Not only are Exsises the best motorhomes in the world, but they always are driven by the nicest people!
This is one social network we love being part of
Chris and Susan
Hello everyone
Fantastic to see all the support – I’m sure there are very few Exsis on the road that haven’t been modified, repaired or rescued thanks to the info on these pages!
Very happy to chip in!Chris and Susan
There are loads of videos on Youtube now exploring the Vision Venture at the Dusseldorf show – amazing how many Vanlife bloggers are out there! I’m sure Hymer are pleased at the amount of attention it has received
This video (in German with English subtitles) is the most thorough I’ve seen yet
– although it does finally contain the one detail which I hadn’t found anywhere else, which to me puts the whole concept out of contention as an Exsis replacement:
6.3 metres!! and yet there’s nowhere near the amount of storage as in the Exsis. There’s still nothing like our little miracle vans…
There’s a really comprehensive account of the DIY repair of a Hymer bumper (front bumper of an A-class, but I presume it’s a similar material) on the Our Tour blog:
Once you’ve checked that out, you can spend many happy hours browsing the rest of the Our Tour blog… Julie and Jason are a fantastic couple who have spent years full-timing in their Hymer, and their blog is a great source of travel ideas and overnight camping spot suggestions!
Chris
We also had this problem – the ABS & ASR lights came on a few times during our Big Trip but, like Alan, we always found that re-starting the engine cleared the lights and everything would be fine for a few hundred more miles.
This happened more and more frequently but thankfully all was well till we got back home!
Our local mechanic found the problem to be a cracked ABS ring which activates a fault code in the sensor – exactly the same kind of thing as Fred & Gill describe from their Rover 400
It’s just a small metal serrated ring which looks as if it should just cost a few £ – but the Fiat dealership kept insisting that the only way to get a replacement was to order an entire driveshaft assembly at over £300! Thankfully we have a great mechanic, who hates being forced to spend silly money, so he kept ordering separate components until, after a few tries, he hit on a solution costing about a quarter of that amount – a new CV joint – this is the part number:
Hope that info comes in handy if anyone else faces the same problem!
Our mechanic also assured us that it’s fine to drive with the amber ABS & ASR lights on – just that the ABS is disabled for whichever wheel has sent the fault code.
Hi all
Forgive the loonnggg post…
We were in Portugal for most of March this year, travelling from South (we crossed from Seville in Spain) to North (heading towards Santiago) as part of our Big Year Out and LOVED it. The weather was stunning, pretty much the whole time, and I think had been all winter – I don’t think this can be relied on every year, but this year it was blue skies and late teens / early twenties temperatures every day.
And TRAMS! (a few years ago we founded ‘the wee tram’, a guided tour of Belfast’s Titanic shipyard on board a replica tram – in the process becoming vintage tram nerds – so Portugal was definitely on our to-do list!)
Like Spain, we found Portugal quite busy for motorhomers in the Winter – they can rely on a steady trade of ‘snowbirds’ (mostly Brits and Germans, we found) making their way South for Winter and so plenty of sites stay open. There’s also a pretty well-developed aires network in Portugal. We especially loved the ‘Turistcenter’ campsite near Lagos and the campsite in Zambujeira Del Mar – and highly recommend the aires at Sagres, Mafra (free & with electric hook-up!), Obidos and Tavira. For Lisbon, we stayed (along with a handful of other vans every night, it seems to be encouraged) in the vast car park of the ferry terminal at Seixal, so we could just tumble out of the van and on to the ferry every morning, 10 minutes crossing to the heart of Lisbon!
And now here’s the long bit: I’m going to paste the ‘Portugal’ section of one of the travel emails we sent home from our Big Trip. I’m working on turning these emails into some sort of travel blog of our whole trip, with pics. This is the sneak preview!
So, Portugal! Now I know I’ve been raving about Spain until you wanted to throw a bucket of cold water over me and tell me to calm down. But the thing is, I think we liked Portugal even more – they’re similar in a lot of ways, but we reckoned Portugal just has the edge. It’s a bit greener, a bit scruffier, a bit more laid-back, a bit cheaper – and it has a proper coast with a proper ocean: we’d had some lovely times on the Costas on the east coast of Spain, looking out at the meek and mild little lapping waves of the Med, but as soon as we reached Sagres on the west coast of Portugal and saw vast breakers crashing in from the savage Atlantic, something in our Celtic souls clicked back into place.
Portugal was where we really started to master the slowing-down thing I mentioned at the start. We weighed anchor for a few days on a luxury (but el-cheapo off-season) campsite near Lagos with a swimming pool and power showers and washing & drying machines the size of the Large Hadron Collider (yes, sad as it may seem, these are the things to truly warm the cockles of the heart of the long-term traveller), and for a few days more at a tiny resort called Zambujeira del Mar. The pleasures here were many and manifold: as well as the entertainment value of saying its name in a Jamaican accent, Zambujeira (mon!) smelt amazing (we camped surrounded by pine and eucalyptus trees and fresh-blooming mimosa) and boasted heart-stopping cliff-top walks above more of those cataclysmic Atlantic breakers.
Next stop Lisbon, and the excited child in me had been looking forward to Lisbon since the start of the trip. Trams trams trams trams trams! Finally we were going to ride on a proper honest-to-goodness tram that wasn’t a museum piece in a heritage park, wasn’t a swoopy smooshy grey boring new one, and wasn’t (ahem) an affectionate ‘wee’ approximation of the genuine article. Lisbon (and, we were later to discover, Porto) just kept using their old tram system long after other cities had ripped up their tram lines and switched to smelly buses in the name of progress. At various times over the last few decades, this probably made them look hilariously old-fashioned and quaint: but now, as anyone with any taste knows, trams are cool – it was incredible to see those venerable old tramcars crammed with people, ding-donging merrily through the switchback streets within millimetres of parked cars’ door mirrors. The locals still use them as quick, regular, handy city-centre transport (we even saw a few people hitch a cheeky ride by jumping on the back, just like in the old shipyard photos) but I think most of us on board were fellow tourists, grabbing on to the leather straps as the tram wove and wobbled its way over the hills, relishing the ride with an expression that said: trams trams trams trams trams!
Now I wouldn’t want you to think that poor Susan had to endure countless tram trips and even a tram museum in Lisbon. Or maybe I should say, I wouldn’t want you to think that poor Susan had to endure nothing but countless tram trips and even a tram museum in Lisbon. We did some other cool stuff too! (the tram took us there.)
We visited Belem to stand in the shadow of the mighty Explorers Monument and to try our favourite Portuguese tasty treat (pastel de nata – little custard tarts mmmmmmm) in Pastels De Belem (where they were invented).
One night we went out for dinner and realised we had stumbled across a proper local Fado bar. Fado is the passionate, melancholic traditional folk music of Portugal which rose up from the slums of Lisbon. We first encountered it in a little town called Tavira when we had just crossed the border, drawn in pied-piper-style by the music echoing along a little side street to a lovingly-curated Fado museum where the musicians were just about to give a demonstration. The musicianship was incredible: one classical guitar, one impossibly-complex 12-string guitar playing counterpoint, and one voice – oh, that voice! – such emotion, lament and loss and strength and spirit.
So in Tavira we had heard Fado as an art-form, accomplished and technically exquisite. In Lisbon, we experienced Fado as a tipsy bar-room hooley: crammed into a tiny, hot, sticky-floored attic room, the singers (this time there were three: one man, one fearsomely-intimidating lady, and one other guy who we initially took to be a tramp who had wandered in off the street, but who suddenly burst into song with an incredible, yearning singing voice) moved amongst the audience, squeezing between the jam-packed chairs and teaching us all to join in with the choruses and responses. Susan and I were even ordered up to dance for the final up-tempo number. (The lady singer brooked no disobedience.). It was sweaty, spirited, funny, friendly, a bit rough-around-the-edges – a little peek into the soul of the city.
Another day we had brunch on the top deck of a double-decker bus on top of a shipping container, as you do. ‘Village Underground’ was one of those unbearably-cool hipster urban pop-up places, built from shipping containers, old buses, and copious quantities of beard oil for all those lovingly-cultivated bushy beards. Even though we weren’t cool enough to be there by a factor of about a thousand million, they served us up the most amazing brunch, all arriving in courses like a gourmet banquet: granola and yoghurt, bagels and pancakes, fresh fruit, oven-baked eggs, bacon and goats cheese… amazing! Afterwards we went shopping in LX Factory, another repurposed industrial space filled with pour-over coffee emporiums and flip-flop boutiques. And how did we stumble upon these hidden treasures, I hear you ask? Well, it just so happens that they were right beside the tram museum. You see! It’s all thanks to the tram.
Winding our way northwards, clinging to the coast, Portugal just kept getting better and better. Mafra was a tiny wee town utterly dwarfed, as of a rowing-boat in the shadow of the Titanic, by a monumental baroque palace containing a library so vast that there’s a colony of bats living there.
Óbidos, a whitewashed, battlement-encircled hill village, introduced us to ginja, a potent cherry liqueur served in a little chocolate cup – when you’ve necked the shot of liqueur, you eat the cup. The shopping streets were packed with ginja stalls charging €1 a pop – and, well, it would have been rude to walk past any of them at that price.
We also discovered ‘Book and Cook’, a hotel/restaurant where the tottering walls were crammed with 65,000 books and every menu item was named after an author. It was like we had accidentally stumbled into Susan’s subconscious and were eating dinner in the living embodiment of her dreams.
Nazaré, another oops-we-appear-to-have-accidentally-stayed-here-for-five-days-how-did-that-happen, is Portugal’s surfing capital and consequently all the cafes and restaurants are big on seafood. Looking for lunch one day – really, just wanting a sandwich or a panini or something – we couldn’t find anywhere that wasn’t serving ginormous platters of swordfish or lobster or sea urchins. Finally we plumped for a cafe advertising tapas – you cant go wrong with tapas – and asked the friendly waiter to help us with translations of the tapas menu. “Ah! ok, that one is chicken gizzards – that one is raw mince – that one is little fish with their glassy dead eyes still looking at you -” (I may be paraphrasing here) “- and that one is octopus, our speciality.” So, first-ever experience of octopus it was! Quite tasty actually.
Incidentally, once we told the waiter where we’re from, he broke with all tradition and had actually been to Belfast – in fact, he had even lived there for 6 months. (Pretty much 100% of the rest of the time, people either say “oh yes, I’ve been to Dublin/Galway/Cork/Kerry” or “d’you know, I’ve never been to Ireland, but I’ve always wanted to go…”). Words can’t describe how surreal it was to hear an extremely Portuguese bloke saying the words “Connswater shopping centre” and (his favourite phrase from his time in NI) “aye, dead on”.
Onwards to Coimbra, pretty much a perfect little city: lovely riverside walks past a cool multicoloured fountain, cobbled olde-worlde town centre, steep medieval streets packed with cosy bars and coffee stops, and – unexpectedly perched at the top of it all – a venerable university with libraries and clock towers and views out over the city from the balconies.
And then to Porto, in lots of ways like a slightly scaled-down Lisbon (including, as already mentioned, more trams trams trams trams trams! I know I speak for both of us when I say that the appeal of a tram ride was in no way whatsoever getting old.)
Porto was also home to temporary exhibitions on two of our favourite artists: MC Escher (all those engravings of impossible architecture, staircases where the bottom meets the top, that kind of thing) and Banksy (who became even more famous a few months ago by partially shredding one of his pictures and thereby adding further millions to its value). So, having started our Iberian chapter with Dali, Picasso and Gaudi, it was coming to a close with Escher and Banksy.
Hi Katy
We’ve just arrived home – so the Big Year Out is now starting to feel like a dream that happened to someone else! Once we get our photos sorted we’ll post a few links here if any of you on the forum would like to check out our story
As to the rustproofing – I was impressed with Rustbusters but they definitely weren’t cheap. I think if it had been a straightforward job, the quote was somewhere in the region of £550 – but once they had steam-cleaned underneath our van, they found some areas that needed welding (mainly around the drivers side wheel arch) and that pushed the price just above £1000.
I’m sure I could have got the welding done more cheaply somewhere else – but having made the journey over from Belfast primarily to get the rustproofing done, I was happy to leave the van in Spalding for an extra day and let them do the job properly. I figured it would be a false economy to do a piecemeal job on the repairs before covering them over with the rustproofing gunk.
I’m fully intending to return to Spalding at some stage every year to keep the rustproofing ‘topped-up’ – once you’ve paid the big initial bill, they do a good deal on the price of an annual inspection and touch-up. They recommend doing the whole job again after 5 years and again they give a good discount if you’ve been regular with the inspections.
Hope that helps!
Chris
Fantastic to hear from Keith and Zarita and I’m glad you got to enjoy the beauty of Glen Coe again! We often said that despite all the wonders we saw during our year, there wasn’t much to match those first days in Scotland… you’re right, we met right at the start of our trip (I think we were maybe on Day 3)
Believe it or not, the vast majority of the stuff in the pictures was already on board when we met you, stashed away somewhere in the cupboards… we didn’t add much – we tried to operate a strict ‘one in, one out’ principle – ie if I’m tempted to buy a new pair of shoes, I have to pick a pair to throw out. It keeps things clutter free and also helps to prevent spending on things you don’t need!
The one exception was the set of Dorling Kindersley travel guides for the countries we were intending to visit – we treated ourselves and bought the books just before we left the UK and they were a great way to inspire us for the road ahead.
And Barry – the biscuit cupboard is a must!! it’s as if that’s what the drop-down lockers were designed for… the only question is whether to have one biscuit cupboard or five!
Delighted that we seem to have started a sash blocker craze across the Exsis community…. the sash blocker manufacturers must be wondering why they are suddenly in such high demand!
chris & susan
I’m afraid I didn’t keep any of the packaging so I don’t have a model number for our sash blockers – can’t even remember what the DIY store where we found them was called!
Looks like there are plenty of options on Amazon – just search ‘sash blockers’ or ‘sash jammers’- eg
2 x Key Locking Sash Blocker / Window Jammer – Restrictor Lock https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B076HQG1MG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_QHkSCbK9WFX0T
Some are push-button-released but for extra security you can get key-operated ones (so they can’t be opened by someone breaking the window and reaching inside)
Good luck and look forward to hearing about your travels!
