It’s been a very long time coming, but finally the van is fixed. I’m pretty sure that the word “fixed” cannot be used definitively here, but at any rate the Beast is once again a functioning, if slow, member of the active road community, rather than just an oversized trailer with no tow hook.

The Beast is back. Looking like a pirate, but back.

As the relief dries off and crusts over with realisation that I now have to stop using a broken van as an excuse, I’ve been trying to work out what I have learnt from the whole experience. I wanted to share that wisdomous pearl with you, so that in a similar situation you know how best to get your food van back on the road. There’s a problem with that though. Looking back over the last three or four months there are a few decisions I wish we hadn’t made, like the time we bought a dodgy food van back in 2011, but none of them could really have been spotted and used in class as an example of how not to get a vehicle working. When you have no choice, that plan is your best shot. There have been quite a few of those.

I have also thought about officially retracting a blog post from earlier this year where I claimed that vans were better than gazebos. We have been trading from a gazebo almost continually for the last 6 months, and have refined the process to an almost manageable level. Without the gazebo we would be long out of business, returned to the hum of artificial lighting, computer screens and admin inside an office somewhere or resigned to the kitchen of a restaurant.

Yet here we still are. Thanks to a tent and a Volvo and the hard work of our latest mechanic we’re still just about hanging on. We got to our first event yesterday in the company of the Beast: karting with Red Bull Racing.

It was clearly not one where we would have been welcomed in the gazebo, what with f1 being better known for vehicles than tents. We hadn’t even warned them that gazebo use might have to happen. This event the Beast had to be back, and thankfully, he was, and it was easy. No loading, no building, lots of room and great feedback. It was as if we’d never left.

I appreciate gazebos more these days. When they’re not blowing away, wet and cold they are a good way to get to an event without thousands of pounds of mechanical work. You can make them look reasonably professional with a cheap vinyl banner and a cross bar, they don’t explode on the motorway and the flame retardant material means that even when you do leave them in a mechanics yard and someone decides to start a fire there they probably won’t burn too much.

Gazebos are not as fun as vans.

That happened as well. During the final week when we had, once again, run out of mechanical failure and were just about to collect the Beast, someone started a fire in the yard at the re-conditioners. It melted the front grill, most of the internal wiring and took a load of paint off. It all got repaired again, but the front grill, as with all parts of the LT mk1, is impossible to source, so he will be looking like a pirate until we can get hold of it.

I don’t want to speak too soon, because he still has a tough summer ahead, but I have never been so pleased to be back in that van. Welcome home, Beasty.

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