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Tour 2008 - Brighton, East Sussex

The Brighton Caravan Club site is your stereo-typical, predictable Caravan Club clone. Tucked away in a valley a short distance from Brighton, the site is at the top of a long winding approach road and located in a sheltered valley, which was fortunate given the stormy weather brewing up. To get the best views, we headed for the top tier, which, whilst the furthest away from the toilet block (and hence the least popular) afforded the best views. Despite torrential rain and gale force winds, the grass pitch was free draining and remained solid enough for us to move on easily.

The bright lights of Brighton are a good 30 - 40 minute walk away, however, a 10 minute walk down hill (15 mins back up) takes you down to Brighton Marina with it’s complex of shops, restaurants, bars, petrol station and an Asda Supermarket. There is plenty of outside parking for motorhomes as well as inside parking in a multi-storey for smaller vehicles.

From the Marina, access to the centre of Brighton is easy on the Volk Electric Railway which trundles frequently between the city centre and the marina for a small return fare. The weather was unseasonal for early September - very windy, extremely heavy churning sea and cold enough for scarfs and hats. There were lots of hardy people around grimly enjoying the sea air whilst Lifeguards sheltered under incongruous red and yellow sun shades, clinging determinedly onto them to stop them blowing away.

Once you get off the electric train, there are lots of interesting little shops and stalls tucked away under the promenade. Another interesting area to grub around is The Laines, with its mix of hippy, craft, ethnic and gift shops. We found the more famous “Lanes” to be mainly jewellery shops.

Despite the atrocious weather, the site filled up on Saturday night, but there was still a large choice of pitches when we left on Sunday morning, heading towards Pevensey……..

Image Above: Brighton Caravan Club Site in the pleasant summer weather of 2008. Copyright AvailablePitch.com 2009

Tour 2008 - Chichester to Brighton via Emsworth and Fishbourne

Before leaving the Camping and Caravanning Club site at Chichester, we’d planned to walk to the nearby picturesque village of Emsworth, however heavy rain scuppered that plan, so we took the motorhome down en-route to Brighton. And we are glad we did as it’s well worth a visit – a very pretty historic town with the type of friendly, traditional shops so sadly missing from High Streets today – butcher, greengrocer, patisseries, gift shops and LOTS of pubs and restaurants. Two large car parks with no height barriers meant that there were no problems parking out of high season on a Friday.

Grubbing round here here for a morning would have been lovely, but the rain was horizontal and we were wet to our underwear. After a quick change and a de-mist of the windscreen, we set sail for Brighton, calling in at the Roman Palace, Fishbourne en-route. A huge car park with no height barriers made it a motorhome-friendly place to visit and using the Caravan Club 's “Days Out” brochure, we got entry at two for the price of one.

Fishbourne Roman Palace was discovered by accident during the digging of a water main trench in 1960. The discovery led to nine seasons of excavations that showed the site had developed from a military base at the time of the Roman invasion in AD43 to a sumptuous Palace by the end of the first century. Between 1995 and 2002, new excavations by the Sussex Archaeological Society revealed exciting new insights into the development of this site. A good 3-4 hours should be allowed to fully explore the palace and the grounds, unfortunately, the continuing rain kept us indoors and we weren’t able to explore the gardens. There is a pleasant café, and we had lunch before resuming our journey towards Brighton.

Passing through the South Downs, we made a mental note to come back and stay in this lovely area. We’d planned to stop at Arundel but it was STILL pouring with rain and we wanted to avoid the weekend traffic approaching Brighton, but it looked very nice as we passed through.

We were heading for the Brighton Caravan Club site but had had a devil of a job getting in for the weekend. The site was showing full online and we’d tried ringing the wardens direct for several days but continually got through to voicemail. We eventually got to speak to a human, and were told they had a few vacancies left. On arrival, there were loads and loads of spaces, both on Friday and Saturday, so what’s happening with their website??

Image Above: Old Pier, Brighton in unseasonal September weather 2008. Copyright AvailablePitch.com 2009