A Time of Magic

An RV purchase means some serious cash no matter what size of rig that you’re looking at.

That being the case, if you’re in the market for one it seems only sensible to try and reduce the cost by looking at used motorhomes, but is that a sensible thing to do? The snag is that RVs vary a LOT in how they’ve been used. You can find one that’s basically only been used a couple of weeks per year over a number of years but then what about the mileage that was ran up during those couple of weeks? Actually, the mileage is rarely the problem but where the rig was taken might be: low mileage on unpaved roads would usually be worse than high mileage on paved roads. Finally, there’s the usage of the equipment inside although you’ll generally not have too many issues on that front.

It’s definitely worthwhile having a look but make a long checklist of questions before you begin.

I was puzzling over that today and there’s no really good reason why there shouldn’t be such a thing and yet there doesn’t appear to be one.

On second thoughts, one reason does spring to mind and that’s the sheer level of uncertainty about it all or rather the uncertainty about how long it will continue. After the initial week or so of cancellations it seemed like air travel was at an end within Europe but that changed very suddenly in the second week. Then the prognosis flipped to the other extreme with us seemingly being able to ignore the volcano until we found that airports were suddenly closed.

The problem now is that nobody really knows whether this disruption will continue for a few weeks more or whether it’s going to be the norm. If the latter is the case, a one-stop website would really clean up in terms of advertising. On the other hand, if it’s the former then there’s a lot of effort that would need to be put in to collect the information and with little prospect of payback for that effort. There’s also the accuracy problem as airlines and airports seem to make decisions at very short notice which is a recipe for lawsuits.

The only real certainty in all this is that it seems crazy to think about booking a holiday this summer that involves any kind of air travel.

That’s a question with no easy answer. Last time there was a similar eruption it ran for over a year which isn’t exactly a reassuring precedent.

That was way back in the 1820s though and I suspect that it didn’t make a whole lot of difference to activities within Europe even for those that were aware of it. This time it’s quite different and we find ourselves forced back into the transport technologies of the 1800s once more. Thus the many daytrips made for business and pleasure every day throughout Europe have all been cancelled. No more is it possible to get from London to Prague and back in a day, or at least not for a while anyway.

Out too probably are those relatively long distance holiday flights. For those that haven’t booked already, I suspect that consideration of a week on a Greek island is probably out for this year even if the dust does clear up which I’m sure is less than welcome news in Greece in its current economic woes. As far as the UK goes, I suspect that holidays in France will be the order of the day or at least in parts of France that are relatively easy to get to by car. Some people do drive all the way from England to southern Spain for their holidays every year and there will be more of them but it’s probably safe to say that the numbers going on the cheap flights to the same places will be severely curtailed: it just ain’t viable to drive to t south of Spain and back within the confines of a one week holiday.

If it goes on for the months that seems likely it would be easy to see some travel insurance companies going bankrupt unless they can get out of payments through an “act of God” provision. Will the budget airlines survive at all? They don’t have to pay out for the hotels but they do have to pay out for a lot of operational costs that aren’t easily cut quickly and despite what people may think of the rip-off tactics of, say, Ryanair those tactics are merely a sign that they’ve not been doing overly well economically in this recession: add an extended grounding and it wouldn’t be a big surprise if they didn’t survive.

Holiday cancellations are a shame but Europe has become quite integrated over recent years and it’s business that will be hit quite hard were the grounding period to become quite extended. Clearly holiday companies will be the most obvious ones to feel the pain but many other companies have operations spread across Europe with corresponding meetings requiring air travel on a regular basis. It’s one more blow that we could all do without.