Why a Campervan?

By Mark Stutt

Mark recalls how his love affair of VW campervans started.

Why a Volkswagen? Why a Campervan?

I think it almost starts from when I was a little child and my uncle had a Karmann Ghia, which he brought round to show us once, and I was really surprised when the engine wasn’t in the front, and it was in the back, and I think that’s when I first heard of Volkswagen as a make of car.

Alike a lot of people, I didn’t come to VW campervans from the driving or the petrol side of things, it was from the camping side. I liked going cycle touring, sticking my tent in the panniers and cycling all around Europe; that was my real like.

When I met my wife we went camping a few times, but quite quickly realised that we didn’t really like tent camping. On one particular occasion, we were in the Yorkshire Dales in the middle of a rainstorm, and onto the campsite came a Volkswagen T2. He drove up onto his pitch, popped up the roof, stuck the kettle on and sat back with a book as we were sitting in the tents getting soaked, and that sparked the idea to get a campervan, and harping back to my uncle’s old car; a Volkswagen.

I did research on campervans, and VWs, and VWs and campervans are pretty much synonymous; you think of one, you think of the other.

Doing the research, I found and discovered the Volkswagen community that’s available online, and they helped answer loads of questions that I had about VW campervans, and the people I met on it then, are still friends now.

Now we’ve got Jennifer, our daughter, we love going camping in the campervan as a family. It helps build memories, we go all over the country, all around Europe in the campervan, and we love exploring the countryside with Jennifer, and I think her love of the countryside outdoors has come from our use of the campervan.

Hopefully Jennifer will take Charlie with her when she’s old enough, and she can make some more holidays and memories herself.

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