In 2014 we swapped a working life for a travelling one. Since then we have travelled in Europe by motorhome for around five months each year. This is our story.
Our plan for next year's big trip is to head for the Peloponnese during October and November, fly home for Christmas, get back on the road in early February and tour around Southern Italy and Sicily. We are toying wth the idea of flying back at Easter, then driving the van home during May and early June. Family commitments mean we can't really be out of the country for more than 12 weeks or so, so the hopping back home every so often is a compromise. Thanks to easyJet and Ryanair the cost of flying from Southern Europe to Manchester is often considerably less than our children pay to get the train home from London.
So far I've come up with a plan to speed us to Greece by mid October in order to get some warm autumn sunshine and a chance to swim in the Med without the need of a trisuit. This involves using the Ancona Ferry to Patras rather than the shorter Brindisi route which will save a couple of days travelling, and almost 400 miles of diesel which almost pays for the additional cost of the longer sea crossing.
Plan A...
So, one of the ways I keep myself sane in-between trips is to plan the next one - this is not a result of owning a motorhome, I have always travelled in my head, even when my feet were firmly stuck under a desk.
The first 'big trip' that Gill and I ever planned was an extended cycle tour around Brittany and Belle Isle back in 1982. When we were students we were always too skint to travel for any length of time. Afterwards, in my mid-twenties, I worked in various dead-end office jobs, and though Gill had a six week summer break as a teacher, I was limited to two weeks. When I was 27 I decided to train as a teacher too, so before start of the PGCE we were able to spend six weeks cycle camping in France. I remember buying IGN maps and carpeting the floor of our small flat in Manchester with them - the sheets joined-up so the entire living room was taken up with a giant image of Western France. I carefully annotated each one with details of campsites from the Michelin Guide.
Belle Isle, August 1982
Seville, March 2015 - mystery...where did the intervening 33 years go?
Even in these days of Apps and Google maps, I still enjoy annotating printed maps with places to stay and points of interest. I spent hours transferring information from the ACSI book and Camperstops into our Italian road atlas. Even better! When the Freytag & Berndt map of the Peloponnese arrived from Amazon I was delighted to find the large scale map covered both sides of a giant fold-out sheet. I soon had it spread across the dining room floor and was marking it up with ACSI sites and wild camping spots gleaned from Peejays Greek stopovers and Camperstops. Somehow, for all their advantages of scaleability, streetview and POIs, I still can't get as excited about Google Maps as I do over a printed map. A well designed map is a thing of beauty as well as utility. Maybe I am just the wrong generation to appreciate the beauty of an App. For me, they never progress beyond the utilitarian. I use them, but can't say I am fond of them.
The Peloponnese map - too big for the table - excellent!
So, a few plans in hand, but still ferries to book, flights to arrange, storage to sort - and the van is still in Lincoln being repaired. But in four days time it will be August, then we will be able to say, "We're headed for Greece next month." That sounds great, especially as the temperature here right now is a miserable 13 degrees and it's tipping down, of course it is, it's the first Monday of the school holidays. Someone pasted this on my Facebook timeline this morning. I can sympathise....
Gill is an avid reader of motorhome travel blogs. Other people's 'wanderlust' does help us rationalise our our own predilections for escape; it is reassuring to realise you are not alone in having a minor obsession about leaving home. Indeed, it becomes clear that others are suffering from an even more virulent dose of the travel bug. Fred Smith was speculating about his next trip in a post to Motorhome Adventures Facebook site while driving up the M20 little more than an hour after arriving back in Dover. At least we manage to struggle as far north as the delights of Watford Gap before the the thought crosses our mind, "Why exactly did we come back?" The blog Gill is reading at the moment belongs to Jengog. Jennifer charts her in-between time assiduously, "It is Day 5 of 120 days . 5 Days have passed since we returned home and there are 115 left before we head off on holiday again." I began to wonder, why is it so many of us arrive home from a trip only to start immediately dreaming of the next one? I concluded that it is an addiction to a particular kind of personal freedom.
It was yesterday's pile of mail that led me to this conclusion. Amongst the usual mix of bills and junk mail was an annual statement from Halifax giving the run-down on our expenditure over the past 12 months on our Clarity credit card . We use this card abroad for all purchases and in ATMs as it is by far the cheapest way of avoiding currency charges. The total charges on our spend of £7,873 was £48 for the whole year. I think that is impressive. What using the card also gave us was a total cost for our 5 months on the road - from the £7,873, at least £350 needs to be subtracted to cover the cost of wine shopping sprees for consumption in the UK and the replacement main battery in the van when we broke-down in Spain. So, by my reckoning 163 days travel cost us around £7,500.
This figure, which on the face of it seems substantial, pales into mere petty cash as soon as you open the Viking Ocean Cruise brochure which popped through the door at the same time as the Halifax statement. Viking advertises a 15 day Ancient Empires and Holy Lands cruise around the Eastern Med costing from £3,990 per person, So, 15 days bobbing about in the Med, being herded every so often around famous sites like a school party - the cost for a couple, without any extras to cover eating out while ashore - £7, 980. Cost of motorhoming for five months, going where you like, when you like, dressed how you like, cooking what you enjoy using fresh local ingredients, discovering local wines that never get anywhere near a Tesco shelf - £500 less. Expressed as a daily rate the Mediterranean cruise is more than eleven times more expensive than our winter jaunt by motorhome.
It's not just about money, it's really more to do with personal preferences and, for want of a better expression, 'life style choices'. Even if we had been able to carry on in our well paid jobs into our sixties and had the kind of disposable income to fund a two week cruise to some exotic spot, I don't think we would ever have opted to do it. The brochure is full of phrases about 'relaxing on board in the ship's luxurious spa' or enjoying 'high class entertainment'. For starters, I relax by doing different stuff, not by doing less. As for entertainment, well I don't really enjoy being entertained either, not at least as an end in itself, if I read a book, watch TV or a film, surf the net, walk down a street, if I can't actually learn something I soon get bored and do something else. I think I get bored very easily; being stuck on cruise ship with a load of random strangers would some kind of personal hell for me.
Then there is the question of craving luxury. I am not a big fan of that either. Just by way of illustration - back to the question of what to do in the 'bit in-between'. Well one of the things we are doing is getting the van fixed in preparation for next year's journey. It's not cheap - MOT and service (£299), Domestic Service (£177), that was last week. This week Maisy is on her holidays at CamperUk, the main LMC dealship in Lincoln. Finally the bent rear end resulting from 'Volvo-gate' will get repaired and a list of other irritating problems fixed at the same time. Even taking into account the main repair will be paid through our insurance, the bill is still likely to be over £1000. What our visit to the dealership did enable us to do was have a wander around some high end Cathargos in the showroom, one of which was on offer, reduced by £24,000 to a bargain price of £149,000. The price reduction was as much as we paid for Maisy outright!
Maisy - abandoned at the repairers....
A bargain, at a mere £149.000
swanky interior
OK. granted, not having to clamber over each other if you want a wee in the small hours would be good...
I think, even if I was rich, I would find the Cathargo embarrassingly luxurious. Aside from that, because Maisy is basically a builders truck with a bed and bog in the back and ideas above her station, then I don't worry about heading down an un-metalled track towards an empty beach, or squeezing along a narrow lane with twigs scratching the side panel. But in 150 grands worth of Cathargo? No way. Having thought about this, I think what I love about the way we motorhome is that it makes ordinary days more interesting, but more than that, occasionally you come across some place that prompts an overwhelming sense of freedom, a moment of pure joy.
One of the things I do in the bit in-between is re-read some of our blog. It's nice to have a record of our interesting ordinary days. Scattered amongst this journal of the mundane are fragmentary moments of freedom, unplanned, unexpected and magical:
So what do I conclude from my in-between moments of reflection? Well it re-inforces something I was thinking about last year while doing the research for my MA. It struck me that there is a fundamental difference between the pursuit of pleasure and the urge for freedom. Whereas the former is relative, the latter is absolute. What I mean in practical terms is that it is possible to enjoy small pleasures - a good cup of coffee in a cafe with a great view, an unexpectedly lovely bottle of wine, a romantic moment shared. Freedom is different, it is not possible to be partly free. So those fleeting moments when you have a sense of uplifting liberty, though infrequent, are profound. I think this is what my alter ego was getting at when he wrote 'there are no small freedoms' -
