Such a Happy Camper!

Yesterday was an exhausting day, to put it mildly. We drove from Trondheim to Ålesund and back to Trondheim with only a short stop of about an hour, which took most of the day. Even though it was a rather quick round trip, it was nice to see places I've never seen before like Molde, Åndalsnes and Ålesund, and we ended a very nice trip with a gorgeous double rainbow and a beautiful sunset.

Before we left the house I updated my status on Facebook saying that we were going to Ålesund, but I didn't mention why. I'm sure people imagined all kinds of weird scenarios, but the truth is that we went to look at a caravan. Not just any caravan, but a brand new caravan accessible for wheelchairs: a LMC Musica 560R. I had no idea such a thing even existed! We're not planning on becoming campers, but we've realized how much easier it would be to go visit friends and family across the country if we could bring our own portable guestroom with us. This way we have a place to store everything we need to leave home, we have a nice place to sleep, it's no problem bringing our dogs, and we have an accessible toilet available at all times.

While we were in Sunndalsøra back in April/May we discussed caravans with a few others, and one of them tipped us off about one that was indeed accessible for wheelchairs. As I already mentioned I had no idea such a thing even existed, but when we arrived home we instantly started looking into the matter. We found out that LMC Caravan, a German company, offered accessible caravans and decided to find a reseller in Norway to get prices and information. After a few phone calls back and forth we were informed of the Musica 560R, and since we had already planned our trip to Paris, we asked him if he could set up an appointment for us to go to the factory in Germany to have a closer look at this model. This was around the time of the rather big flood we experienced a while back, and the reseller was situated in the middle of the madness, which made him quite hard to reach. Sometime later he gave us the name of another reseller in Ålesund, to see if maybe he could get us an appointment with LMC, but after a few days he informed us that LMC had told him that they had decided to stop producing the Musica 560R. The very last caravan had already been finalized, ordered, and shipped to.. Norway?

Needless to say, we were both kind of devastated. We hadn't found any other companies producing caravans with wheelchair access, and now the very last caravan disappeared from right under our noses. I decided to write LMC an e-mail to ask if they knew of any other resellers who might have one available for us, but all I got was a name and an address for a Dutch company. We called the Dutch company, explained what we were looking for and what we would need, and he said they could remodel another caravan to fit our needs. We agreed to speak again after our vacations, and then we went to Paris. While in Paris we received another phone call from the reseller in Ålesund. He called to inform us that the people who had ordered the last Musica 560R had changed their minds, and it was now available to us if we were still interested. Naturally we didn't want to buy it without having seen it first, so we asked if it would be possible to come take a look when we arrived back in Norway - which worked out just fine, so yesterday we drove to Ålesund.

To make a long story short(er), we signed the contract yesterday.

Photo: LMC Musica 560R © Shamini Thevarajah '11