We’re off on our summer holiday to Brittany on Thursday morning. Me and the kids took the van out tonight for a run to make sure iPads & chargers etc all worked…. 

And they did👍

For Father’s Day last week I got some goodies for my van. New headlight bulbs, sidelight bulbs, daytime running bulbs, a rear view mirror and a multi way usb charger. 

What a pain it was putting in the new bulbs in particular the main beam ones. As it turns out the sidelight led’s are too big for the opening …. eBay fail!

The daytime running bugs are simply awesome. They should be at £30 for a pair. An amazing transformation for my transporter😏

I must try and get some sidelight bulbs and fog light bulbs after our holidays. 

During the week I thought to myself that I should use up the extra ‘thermoliner’ that I had. There seemed like enough to either insulate the front doors or the cab roof. I decided the cab roof was getting it. Once again thoosands of bits had to come off but with the help of my beautiful wife we got it done. One small snag, I thought I wrecked the courtesy light. Upon further investigating and the trusty VW t5 forum I found out it was just a fuse. 

Job done!

All I needed to do was put the iPad holders on and find a way to run the 3 metre cables for charging. I only have one 12v socket so I bought a splitter from Halfords…. Now I have 2. I’m never that keen on lots of wires lying about so I decided to try and run them behind some of the dash panels. 

Today I learned how to take my dash apart and put it back together…. Result, only 1 extra screw🤔

It was well worth the effort. The most difficult thing was trying to get the cigar lighter tray out…. I had to take out the full lower dash to access the two final screws. Just as well I did it really as there were signs of a trapped wire leading to the 12v socket. Fixed!

Whilst I had everything off I decided to run a charging wire for my phone up to the top tray. It will look a lot neater when I have my phone/satnav in my CD slot mount. 

“You can never have enough USB sockets” 

It seems that everything runs from USB now. I’ll never understand why car manufacturers insist on installing 12v sockets instead of USB’s. The final gadget to be installed was the multi USB socket. It can charge 5 devices at one time and even offers 2 fast charge ports. Once everything was back together I had to take the kids and their devices to see if it actually did what it says it would…. Guess what, it did. A neat install to keep us all charged up on our long trip to Portsmouth on Thursday. 

We are ready! If I could only nail down (literally) the squeak in the B pillar I’d be a happy man. I’ve been at it twice already…. Maybe the 3rd time’s a charm. Apart from that and a small leak from John’s sliding window, we’re set to go. 

Wash, hoover, wheels cleaned, windows cleaned, packed and we’re off….

France, here we come!      “We’re all going on a ….. “