Leaving the Madrid campsite, I plugged in the 13 pin connector cable from the caravan to the car socket to provide power to the caravan’s indicators, brake lights, fridge etc. Unwittingly, I caught the power lead around the jockey wheel handle, and when I turned right, I pulled the cable out of the socket and destroyed the connector.
I discovered this when I stopped for a short break and had no indicators or brake lights all the way to Bilbao.
What I was afraid of was getting home after the ferry docked – it had to be daylight, otherwise I was stuffed with no rear lights/indicators.
The ferry was due to dock at 20:30 – which would’ve been OK – but then had to hold outside the port until two ferries departed. We docked at 9:15 pm. Then the fun started.
When we were loading in Bilbao, the crew put all the caravans in 3 columns – nose to tail. That would have been fine except we were face to face with 5 columns of HGVs and the exit was behind us. It took 60 minutes to slowly back up each caravan – very tricky when there are closely packed caravans each side.
Now it was 22:15 and really starting to get dark. While this was going on, I velcroed an LED torch to the back of my caravan on the offside just above the tail lights so that it illuminated the red plastic and made a pool of light on the road – got home with no cops chasing!!