135 days...

I find it interesting, that there are many drafts but no published posts, for 9 days. I guess I feel this is more like a school report than a diary and I'm loath to publish anything factually untrue, grammatically incorrect or plain self indulgent.

But I've been feeling self indulgent lately. I'm counting down the days (135) and reflecting on the number of times you get the opportunity to go on holiday for 6 months at a time.
In my case, this will be the third! Well, almost. I've had two 4-6 month working holidays (Boston 2001/2 and Colorado 2004/5) but this will be the first where I will be officially without a job for more than 6 weeks.

6 months travelling.... How will my work ethic suffer? I wonder what the entry back into normal society will feel like? Will I become jaded about getting back into the rat-race? (too lazy?) Will I decide that I'd rather be my own boss ( too poor?) or that we should move to Thailand with the elephants....(too big!)

There's also a possibility all this planned travel will not live up to our expectations, and we end up cutting our plans short. But this scenario almost dares not speak; Daniel feels that returning early could be a bit humiliating after all this bigging up. Bring it on!

£££££, $$$$$ and Budgets

When this blog doesn't get updated for a while you'll know work has been busy, the Internet has been down or I simply have nothing to say. But now that Daniel has finished his exams, perhaps we will see an entry occasionally from him too.

I've been looking at Tuesday 13 November's post and thinking about the plan after Estonia. Latvia and Lithuania, these are two countries about which loom large on a map and about which, I knew nothing. On further investigation, what I've found out is that they apparently have more in common with their Scandinavian neighbours than their Eastern European ones. The possibility of cutting down the amount of time we've planned in Scandinavia has been mooted, especially in light of their relative costs of living. Whilst Scandinavians pay up to 60% income tax and thus everything is 'free', this does not translate to a free ride for non tax payers and could be a huge financial drain. Relaxing in the wop wops (that the boondocks or the back of beyond for none NZers) of Latvia and Lituania will help to eek the budget out a little bit longer.

So what is our budget? I hear you say...
Well, we met a couple of other travellers and their camper in Croatia last year, they told us they had spent about £5000 in 4 months. So, based on that figure, we have an approximate budget of £10, 000 for 4 months, 6 months or 8 months or however long it may last. Based on current exchange rates that's about NZ$27000....or a small house deposit.

With a budget of £2500 for diesel, and as long as the cost of oil doesn't massively exeed US$100/barrel, at £65/tank and having an undefined mpg figure, we estimate 400, 450 or 500 miles/tank that's 15000, 17000 or 19000 miles. A more precise figure will be available when we have used up the first tank of gas. Initial forecasts are promising, barring a leak in the fuel line such as the one that the Black Bullet just recovered from, we are on track for at least 450 miles/tank.
As you will have gathered, this budgeting lark is an exact science.

It's in the name

So you voted. Whilst I, with my political science degree, wanted to declare the results of the referendum non binding, Daniel decreed that it would be bad luck to ignore the majority vote an thus, continue the Adventures of Marea and Daniel and The Red Baron (Pat for short)
So doomed to the obscurity of 'Pat for short' are my visions of Postman Pat and Jess the Cat memorabilia. Just picture it; Jess the cat by the Colosseum, Jess the cat by a Norwegian Fjord.


The Red Baron (Pat for short) has his first outing today.

Unfortunately the Black Bullet -the replacement for the Green Racing Machine - which replaced BB developed a strong smell of petrol on Wednesday morning and had to be taken to hospital. This neccessitated me driving TRB(P4S) to Alfredton train station where my collegue then drove me on to York. I was a bit apphrehensive that Pat would get his neck chopped off by the train station height limit bars, but we were okay as long as we drove in on the wrong side of the road.

Where in the World

Since we've starting planning this trip the biggest question is where will we go?

We are not hot weather people, Daniel's red hair, fair skin and my tendancy for heat rash give us both an incentive to knock Spain off the list before summer sets in.

Very vaguely the plan is thus:
Cross using the channel tunnel and drive to Spain via France.
Spain and Portugal during April then drive up through the south of France to the Netherlands and Denmark in May. Take a ferry to Scandinavia for the longest day and midnight sun in June. June/July in Scandinavia then travel down through St Petersberg and Estonia.
And then....we aren't really sure. Up to 3 months to do Europe and try to get some more stamps in our passports.
I'd like to see Rome again, visit Pompei, Switzerland, eat lots of cheese and drinks lots of wine.
Maybe catch a few of the festivals on Van Tour like, Tomatina, Pamplona, Octoberfest.

• April - France, Spain Portugal
• May - France, Netherlands, Denmark
• June - Norway, Sweden,
• July - Finland, St Petersberg, Estonia
• Aug, Sept, October - Italy, Switzerland, Germany and others.

As I said; very very vague.

Our insurance does limit us to certain countries, which whilst constricting may make our choices just that little bit easier. We've spent some time in Eastern Europe but still want to tick off Prague. I'd like to do such things as an intensive language course in Spain, some volunteer work, stay with some local families, do some hiking.

We have discovered from our previous travels that we don't have burning desire to see everything. There are certain places I'd not wish to miss but we are really going to have to find our own rhythm...else we will probably pack up and come home after 2 months.

On being told to "harden up"

I have splinters! Long ones that I can't remove.
Apparently in Daniel's native farm environment, complaining about splinters is tantamount to saying "I'm a wuss". Not having grown up in this environment, Daniel's amusement at my discomfort is not appreciated.

Said splinters were gathered whilst cleaning out the camper. the wooden interior needs a hammer taking to it...to bang in all the nails that have come loose.

There was so much crap in there! Two shopping bags full of food. A cupboard full of cleaning products, books, pens, bedding, nothing in it's place and nothing had a place.
We could just reuse all the crap, but to me that feels a bit too much like getting all your clothes from the op shop. I want my camper to be like a new school uniform, all clean and crisp.

Daniel is lucky that his study schedule exempts him from the splinter inducing cleaning...for now.

How Cool is This?!?

Yesterday I found the guru of self build campervans.

Today I found the gurus of campervanning. Fullstop.

It's a 1966 German Army fully kitted out UNIMOG with a website dedicated to its travels from the UK down to South Africa. It's not the most functional website, but I broke my 'if it doesn't load in 5 seconds...forget it' rule because it is sooo cool. http://www.tiretracks.org/mogforsale/index.html

Borderline

So a visit to the osteopath today made me think about our seating arrangements in the front of the camper; these are very basic, uncomfortable and not mutifunctional i.e. none of the front seats can be utilised from the back of the camper.

I came across the website http://www.soh.me.uk/ This guru has implemented the perfect solution. If only knew what I was doing and I had the tools to do it.
3 individually adjustable seats, 2 of which pivot to the rear. Awesome!

I found a set of seats for sale on ebay which, apart from the fact that they are located in Cheshire: 85.6 mi or about 1 hour 48 mins, I have absolutely no clue as to whether they would fit etc...

Great, I am turning into a camper geek. There are websites for people like me. http://www.sbmcc.co.uk/

Lollie Scramble

I'm really looking forward to this weekend.
It will be our first opportunity to discover just what we have bought. It seems to be the practise for previous owners to just add as they need, and dump as they leave.

This assortment of goodies is usually advertised as "and much more..." and in our case includes, a pergola, assorted map books and Tonic water, in dinky little cans. Shall we take bets I won't find any gin?
Weather permitting, I plan on emptying out the camper and taking a full inventory....a thorough 'spring' clean wouldn't go astray either.

Only then, can I start on my wish list to equip the camper as my home.

Currently in priority order:

• Larger refillable all over Europe gas bottles
• Stereo with SD and USB and iPod etc.. £60 + speakers £25 from eBay
• Safe for Laptops, speaker face, phones wallets etc...
• Curtain on skylight which runs the length of the camper
• Extra Water?
• Extra Gas?
• Solar Shower?
• Centre Table?
• Add single bed/bench at rear - for Mum on her weekends off.
• Add double bed over cab - so we don't have to make up downstairs bed every night
• Change curtains - They are red!
• Change seat covers - these are a different shade of red
• Change carpet to lino - another shade of red.
• Paint cupboards - these are light wooden veneer.
• Alarm?
• More toilet chemicals?
• Attachable awning? (probably not)
• Window in back door (probably not)

The camper is pretty well equipped for us to take off now, but if we plan on stealth camping a lot then we might need to be a bit more prepared for consecutive days without electrical hookup. And, whilst I may have decorated all my bedrooms in lush claret red, in a red van - it feels a bit claustrophobic and not at all summery.

Photos to come after the weekend:-)

GPS Tracking and Navigation

It has always been part of the grand plan to use Sat Nav for during our European Tour. Towards that end we purchased an all singing and dancing SPV M700 Orange phone for £270 off ebay last year. http://www.business.orange.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Business&c=OUKDevice&cid=1044134008063&extarg1=Phone&t=SMEDeviceFeatures Ours is white.

Supposedly these come with a built in GPS receiver but it was not activated on the one we bought. I had to do some fancy googling before I was confident enough to download from http://www.xda-developers.com/ and flash it with the latest ROM. It could have turned into the most expensive paperweight I'd ever own!

A word of praise for all computer geeks - stuff your copyrights and legalities - they just want it to work! And are happy enough to spend hours answering dummies' questions and posting it all on internet forums; all I had to do was join the dots.

Next on the list for dot joining is GPS Tracking - I'm currently checking out http://www.mologogo.com/ and similar. I imagine it would be fairly useful and interesting to some family and friends to be able to find out just where in the world we are, even if other correspondence (like updating this blog) is curtailed by access to the internet.

A breadcrumb trail of our entire trip would be a great keep sake too. A far cry from the highlighted map book that we have from our Colorado to LA trip. I'm not knocking printed maps though, afterall I am a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Business Analyst. I find all map things fascinating.

How to choose the right Van

So here's the story: Daniel and Marea are New Zealanders based in the UK with work permits that expire 13 April 2008. We'll exit England sometime on or before that date, thus beginning our European Van Tour. Marea suggested 6-8 months, Daniel thinks more like 4-6 months, and we'll have to see what the bank enables. This blog will tell the story, we just have to be home before my sister gets married on 6 Dec 2008 in New Zealand.

We don't currently have much of a plan, the first step was to actually buy our new 'house'. We have purchased it now because a lot of antipodeans are just finishing their 2007 Van Tour and so there is a glut in the market of suitable camper vans. Buying a van now does mean that we have to pay insurance (£600/12 months Walkabout policy with HIC), tax £200 (got this amount knocked off the price to cover it) and we'll still have to get an MOT before we leave. Anecdotally if we were to buy next April, then we could end up paying a lot more for a lot less. The quality of the van setups varies considerably, but we looked at 5 in one weekend and we did have two that we would have been happy to buy.

By the way, if you ever need a carpenter, go look at self converted vans, we met 3 carpenters in one weekend, and they all have mates that are mechanics or are in other trades.

I'd been looking at campers on gumtree and EBay for the last year and I had quite a lot of criteria. We briefly considered buying an empty van and constructing some sort of setup ourselves, but that was quickly discounted when we realised just how much van insurance is (£600 on a £1000 van!) and there was the fact that we wouldn't have a clue where to start!.

High on my list of priorities was:

• suitableness for stealth camping
• Mileage (less than 100000 miles)
• <£3000
• 4 berth (for visitors)
• 3 way fridge
• interior layout
• rear windows
• power steering
• diesel awning
• Long MOT

So I printed out 20 current van advertisements. We rated these based on the above criterion giving them a final score out of 10. Anything below 5 got put at the bottom of the pile. The Red Baron (don't forget to vote on his name) rated highly on mileage, fridge, and price I think it got a 7 or 7.5. I might have knocked off points cause it's only a 2 berth and it's so, so RED.

Our budget was about £3000 and after this one is kitted out with new stereo, and a few other things on my wish list it probably will cost us less than this, so I'm well chuffed.

I must remember to email a few English sceptics who disbelieved I 'd actually get something for less that £5K

In The Beginning

Sun 22 Oct 1030
Saw the ad http://www.gumtree.com/london/00/14497400.html ,
rang the number, Lyndon answered from Paris, but sent us the number of a friend who might show it to us.
I duly text David who we arranged to pick up in Clapham and drove him to London Bridge where the Red Baron was located. We checked him out, and it looked pretty good compared to the previous 5 vans we had looked at. He wasn’t perfect but it had enough going for it that I felt I could really make this van ‘my home’

So we discussed it on the way to my brother’s house where we were going to be taking my nephew to the fun fair for his birthday.

Boom!
We get rear ended by some idiot in a company car. That, on top of our near death experience on the M1 just two day’s before really freaked us out and we were in a serious state of shock.
Try writing insurance details down when you can’t stop shaking.
The crash we’d had the motorway at 70mph had been shocking, a big F*&ko%f truck from Germany tried to change lanes from our left into us. Daniel did marvellously well keeping our little Fiat Punto under control and not getting it stuck under the front wheels of that truck. That charming thought actually hadn’t crossed my mind I’d been more concerned about being shunted into traffic in the inside right lane.

We got drunk! Friday that was, not Sunday.
Sunday, we limped our near dead green racing macine, to my brother’s house in South London and had a stiff cup of tea....with sugar.

In an attempt at normalacy and after a stiff lecture from his dad about being a good boy when Aunty Marea and Uncle Dan, ran out of money, we headed of to the fun fair with ‘four tomorrow’ Matthew
Some-times I wish I was a kid, these fun parks are wonderfully colourful and if you only have one kid, pretty cheap too though I guess spending £20 does feel a little cheaper than NZ$50.

For the very last ride of the day, I convinced him, who “might be scared” to go on the ghost train as long as Uncle Dan held his hand. This ghost train was subsequently deemed to be the best ride, for which I was very relieved. I’d had visions of a bawling Matthew never being allowed to go anywhere with his Aunt again.