Everyone who picks up a van from us asks about Cornwall. Fair enough — we've written that one up. But when people hand the keys back, a surprising number confess they had their best afternoon twenty minutes from our driveway. Essex has a bad press agent, that's all. Here's where we actually go when we take the vans out ourselves.
Mersea Island
Britain's most easterly inhabited island, joined to the mainland by a causeway called the Strood — which floods at high tide, and yes, people get caught out every single week. Check the tide times, or plan to get stuck and treat it as an excuse for a second plate of oysters.
Because that's what you're here for. The oyster sheds of West Mersea have been going since before the Romans left, and eating a dozen natives off a paper plate with the mud in front of you and the boats leaning on their sides is about as Essex as it gets. Out of season it's better — colder, emptier, the light doing strange things over the estuary.
Park up facing the water, brew up, watch the tide come back in over the flats. We've had guests tell us this beat the Cotswolds. We didn't argue.
Maldon
Maldon is where the Thames sailing barges retired to, except nobody told them to stop sailing. On a good day at Hythe Quay you'll see half a dozen of them — tarred hulls, rust-red sails, flags going. The quay pubs have tables that look straight over the mud, and the chippy at the top does the honours afterwards.
It's also where your posh sea salt comes from — the flaky stuff in the pyramid boxes. Same family, same town, since 1882. There's something satisfying about buying it a mile from where they boil the water.
Dedham Vale
Technically we're sharing this one with Suffolk — the border runs down the middle of the river Stour — but the pretty bank is ours and we're claiming it. This is Constable Country: Flatford Mill, Willy Lott's cottage, the actual view from The Hay Wain, still looking almost exactly as he painted it two hundred years ago.
Hire a rowing boat at Dedham and take it up the river, or just walk the water meadows until a duck demands your sandwich. The lanes in are narrow and the National Trust car park takes campervans without any fuss.
Walton-on-the-Naze
Frinton next door got the golf club and the gates. Walton got the fossils, and Walton wins. The red crag cliffs under the Naze tower are crumbling into the sea at a geologically alarming rate, and what falls out is shark teeth — proper ones, millions of years old, free to anyone patient enough to squat on the beach after a rough tide. Kids lose their minds. So do the adults, quietly.
Bring wellies, go at low tide, and climb the tower afterwards if it's open — on a clear day you can see the container ships queuing for Felixstowe like it's the M25.
Burnham-on-Crouch and the bit nobody visits
The Dengie peninsula, between the Crouch and the Blackwater, is the emptiest corner of the south-east: sea walls, salt marsh, one seventh-century chapel standing alone in a field where a Roman fort used to be. St Peter-on-the-Wall is one of the oldest largely intact churches in England and you'll likely have it to yourself, because getting there involves wanting to.
Burnham itself is yacht-club Georgian and good for a wander; the marshes beyond are for the ones who like their landscapes flat, huge and slightly haunted. In a camper at dusk, with the geese coming in — it's something.
The honest pitch
None of these is more than an hour and a bit from our base at Junction 28. You could pick a van up on Friday afternoon and do three of them before Sunday tea without ever getting on a motorway. No five-hour slog down the A303, no fighting for a pitch in a Cornish field that costs more than the van.
Sometimes the best trip is the one where you're home for work on Monday with mud on your boots and half a dozen shark teeth in the cup holder. Grab a van and prove us right.