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Has anyone had to use a recovery service after a caravan failure??

I ask because I had to on Monday night/tuesday morning with almost disasterous results.

Returming from France on the LD lines Le Havre-Pompey ferry, managed to get off the boat and dock in reasonable time, and started the 2.5 hour jouney home.  Just coming to the end of the dual carriageway on the A36 into Salisbury, I had an off-side tyre blow out on the van.  I'm pleased to say that the van remained totally steady - in fact the initial symptom was a seemingly loss of power from the car.  However, I then saw smoke coming off the tyre, and noticed in the rear-view mirror that the van was leaning to one side.  Slowly crawled to somewhere a bit safer - by which time I was running on the rim.  Now here's the first problem - I don't carry a spare, but what followed was something that could happen to anyone that had a failure of part of the running gear.

The recovery insurance arranged a recovery truck, which would be there in an hour.  After 40 mins, truck driver phones and asks the size of the van.  Driver swears and says his truck is too small.  Insurance co. organise another - also too small, and again a third.  Eventually they get in touch with tyre company, who took over an hour to contact us.  Just about to finalise tx with tyre company when Insurance co. phone to say that they have found a bigger recovery truck, which eventually arrived nearly 1.5 hours later.  Truck AGAIN  too small.  Returned to negotiating with tyre company who arrived an hour later to replace tyre. This story commenced at 11.00 at night and we finally got underway at 6.30 in the morning, arriving home at 7.55.

My van is 2.5 metres wide, which was one of the problems, but it was the length (7 metres from hitch to back end) which stopped it going on the truck that actually arrived.  The back end of the van was grounding long before the van wheels were on the ramp onto the truck and I reckon this could happen to any reasonably sized van, especially as I have quite large diameter wheels, and the large double-axled vans have much smaller wheels.

So, OK - my fault for not carrying a spare (which will be rectified before the next outing) - but it does beg the question of how a medium to large van would be recovered if it was some other type of failure.

Del

not a good day for you,this may be of interest.

http://www.ukcampsite.co.uk/chatter/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=8&TopicID=273399&SearchPagePosition=1&search=too+wide&searchMode=phrase&searchIn=Topic&forum=8&searchSort=dateDESC&ReturnPage=Search

I have been with Vehicle Rescue Direct for a number of years, but this was the first time I have had to use them.  Many of the breakdown insurance companies won't look at a wide van, but these people didn't ask for size details when taking out the policy.

Give them their due, they did try to get the van recovered - but given that a call centre operator would probably not know one end of a caravan from another, we all had problems.  Around 4.00 in the morning, the guy we were dealing with stated that he should not have offered ANY assistance at all - saying we should have had a spare - but I could have argued this in that it does not state anywhere in the documentaion for the policy about having to have a spare. I didn't bother with that though, as by this time all I wanted was to get me SWMBO and the caravan back home at any cost!! As this has cost them a fair bit of money, I reckon that there will be some changes to their policies/details in the near future.