Category: Europe (Page 20 of 20)

I was expecting something of an epiphany to happen last Sunday after we took our last boxes to the lock-up and ‘stuff’ to the charity shop and headed back to the trailer in Cambridge before our first evening meal as “Full Timers” but nothing actually happened. We were not struck by a ‘feeling’, a mood or change of thought…. Nothing feels different at the moment, I still feel like we are on holiday, moving about over this week and next, maybe this will happen when we are static for a month or so…..

“Full Time” is the term applied to those who live in their caravan/ motorhome or trailer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without the security or back up of a bricks and mortar base. This term applies to us now as the house is packed away into the lock up and is about to be sold. I can see the attraction of the freedom with motorhomers, being able to up and leave when they are tired of the view but we are slightly different and have to consider our size so have to plan our sites ahead carefully.

David performing his duties before leaving Willingham, Cambridge.

However this past week has been adventurous and interesting. We left Willingham, Cambridge (our “parking spot” for the past 18 months) on Monday morning after a lovely long Sunday roast dinner with our neighbours Keith and Jeannie the previous evening. Several bottles of farewell wine were consumed that night, even though we will be seeing Monica (Keith\’s RV), Keith and Jean again within the next few months! Who needs an excuse to down a few glasses of red???

We must say we have enjoyed our time at Willingham, and I can see why people park up there and stay for years. Lovely facilities, lovely staff and we have met some nice people there.

We arrived at Green Hills Leisure Park near Bicester some 2.5 hours later having had an easy drive and booked in for 2 nights. The well maintained site is on a working farm that is open to the public, has various birds and animals roaming about, a few fishing lakes, an onsite tearoom/cafe serving fresh local produce and their own blend of coffee and even an on-site beauty parlour. If only I had done my homework and seen that beforehand, on the Tuesday morning I would have booked a manicure and pedicure instead of watching the local RV engineer establish why we had a water leak and wet lockers. The culprit was found, a dried up mouse that had made a total mess of the foam surrounding the pipework underneath our bed in amongst the shredded paper and acorn leaves he had dragged in. He was ceremoniously flung into the neighbouring field! He had gnawed through a sturdy water pipe which was replaced, also a new gas pipe and a new shower head were installed making us fully operational again.

The culprit before his burial.

Monday night was the night of “the storm”, the tail end of Hurricane Irma from the USA. Luckily we were allocated an RV pitch, tight up against a row of high trees and behind another large motorhome so other than the noise of the wind waking us at 2.30am, we had a good night’s sleep. The wind was certainly talk of the toilet block in the morning.

We headed off on Wednesday morning, leaving the small village we were in, following the usual Tom Tom Sat Nav. David did comment that he thought we would be heading north, but duly followed the directions onscreen…..right through the next tiny village. When I say tiny, I mean weeny tiny, with beautiful overhanging brick and stone houses and an s-bend so tight you couldn’t see round the corner. We had to pass through two buildings that were just about wide enough to take the trailer, at which point the driver (no names of course) sweated profusely and promptly asked why the “Royal We” had not used the heavy duty industrial Motorhome Snooper given to us by my parents that’s fully loaded with our height, width and weight and set to divert us from such stupid villages??? Who knows….. We calmed down, turned on the Snooper, and guess what, we had to turn around and go back through the village!!! Luckily there was a parallel road so we did not need to squeeze through the village walls again. Phew! First lesson learned.

The journey around the M25 was a pleasure, no hold ups and very little traffic. We arrived in Abbey Wood site, via the humped residential back roads and chose a lovely pitch away from the trees. First thing that struck us was the number of conkers on the floor, we didn\’t want them banging on the trailer roof every night and keeping us awake! However the down side was that there is no water on the pitch or on any pitch and we had forgotten to fill up on arrival so we spent some hours ferrying 5 litre buckets of water to fill the tank and have to top it up each day. Lesson 2 learned – book a pitch with water!!

We have had a lovely week in this almost tropical site which is oddly sat right in the middle of chaotic South East London. At Green Hills site we were close to a private airfield, here we are close to City Airport! However all we can see from the trailer are huge trees, squirrels and parakeets and we hear foxes at night. We have spent lovely relaxing times with friends and eating far too much good food! We visited our old house from 20 years ago in Plumstead and swear they still have the original vertical blinds that we bought at the windows. Such a shame that nothing has been done to it since. We took a train across London and marvelled at how much it has grown upwards, tower blocks and sky scrapers are everywhere and they are still building more. Train stations were so quiet as it was the weekend after the tube explosion at Parsons Green. At the end of the day, it was so nice to come back to the relative quiet of Abbey Wood and it’s greenness and have a chilled glass of wine!

Tomorrow we head off to Wimborne in Dorset to spend another week catching up with friends and family.

Goodbye Abbey Wood.

Our journey started on Thursday 27th November 2014 with the collection of a 3 year old American Eurocruiser 5th wheel from a dealer in Lincolnshire. Following almost a year of looking at large caravans, motorhomes, American caravans and finally 5th wheels, we settled on a baby sized “flat on wheels” that needed to be pulled by our newly purchased Isuzu truck.

The truck was fitted with a hitch and the pin on the trailer had to be adjusted to fit the truck and after a few weeks, we finally collected him (I say “him” because such a large item cannot be female!). We said a very sad goodbye (but a goodbye that was full of happy memories of several years of caravanning) to our Bailey Pageant and Mazda truck and were immediately overwhelmed by the difference in size!

Above photographs shows the slight difference in size between the new trailer and our old Bailey. The pictures below shows how large and wide it is……just wide enough to fit on the B1040 outside our home in Crowland, Peterborough. The “rig” measures 3.8m high, 2.5m wide and a whopping 13m long when hitched together, the trailer when unhitched is 8.4m long. It\’s so long we have to park in the \”coach area\” at service stations!

Samson was duly christened by our nephew Jack Spencer, who felt “the beast” needed a suitable name. He felt that Samson seemed to fit very nicely with Suzi (the Isuzu). Samson and Suzi was therefore created!

Samson spent his first Christmas at Nene Park, Peterborough, fairy lights inside and out.

The beast spent nearly a year parked on the driveway with occasional outings to local touring parks that would accommodate us, giving us many a hilarious moment watching wide mouthed people on the pavement gawping as we passed, probably wondering what on earth this beast was!

We spent a few days in a lovely park in Broadway, Gloucester, home of the first ever documented “touring caravan” called the Wanderer in 1885. It is on display behind glass and was donated by the Caravan Club together with details of the owner’s around the UK trip.

Whilst sitting on the driveway David & I would often sit on the comfortable lounge seats and look out the window, watching the grey, damp and cold Crowland farmland morph into a sunny, warm beach vista and we would comment on the locals out walking their dogs or the number of tourists in the sea that day or it would become a hilltop view of the sun setting on the Sierra Navada mountains and we would marvel at the changes in colour as day turned to night.

During these moments, away from the mobile phones and internet, office jobs and long hours of work, demanding children and general chaos of modern life, we would wonder what it would be like to have none of those worries, to be carefree, and footloose…….many a glass of wine evaporating whilst we were wondering….travelling through sunny Europe with our shell on our back, money in the bank and no-one but ourselves to worry about. The lure of the sun, different cultures, so many varying landscapes, tasty fresh food and the need for the feel of sand, sea and dust between our feet led us to plan a route of travel around the coast of Europe, in Samson. Just the two of us.

Then, suddenly, within a year, our dreams were becoming closer to a reality. David and I had both “taken early retirement”, we had an amazing stroke of luck with selling the big house in a quiet market and promptly found a smaller, comfortable house in a local area, (I believe the term is “we downsized”) and to top it all both children fledged to their own nests. Even Nelson the cat settled into his new abode with Robin and Charlotte, happy with occasional visits from us for cuddles and titbits.

Samson went for an annual service in April 2017, we had sprung a water leak in the toilet over the winter so the 2-3 day visit took a little longer as the dealer needed to import parts from America. In the meantime, we jetted off to sunny Jamaica for 2 weeks!

As time progressed we agreed a date of roughly September 2017 to set off on our travels. This date has approached so quickly, it is frightening.

I personally needed to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” before I felt totally happy to commit to this long term venture. These included understanding that I would be with the same person for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it took me a long time to accept this fact. I often wondered how long it would be before I strangled him……but now I am happy to try it and see.

I also needed to make sure in my own mind that the fledglings were happy and settled and coping with life away from (a) the Bank of Mum and Dad and (b) the readily available fridge contents/ washing machine and dryer/ taxi service and my endlessly disappearing supply of facewipes and toilet rolls.

They seem to be happily thriving and so towards the end of July 2017 we ceremoniously booked a one way ferry crossing for Wednesday 27th September, a mini cruise from Portsmouth to Bilbao with Brittany Ferries and on a friend’s recommendation secured a month’s pitch at Gran Camping Zarautz, about an hour from Bilbao. So our journey begins.