All posts filed under: Motorhoming

Tafraoute – Finding my Travelling Feet

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After Essaouira we headed off down the coast with vague ideas of spending some time near the sea before heading to Tafraoute in the south of Morocco. Tafraoute had long been an eagerly anticipated destination for us. It was always to be the most southerly place on our itinerary, the town where we would finally adopt a slower pace of travel. Whilst Morocco dreaming and Google-searching from my kitchen table in Hebden Bridge I’d stumbled across heart-stirring pictures of blossoming almond trees set against arid red landscapes and discovered that every year the town of Tafraoute held a festival to celebrate this transient spectacle. The dates of the festival were hard to determine so we pledged to try and get there for early February in order not to miss it and it was this aim that had kept us moving so quickly. Through the empty, icy nights of central France, the grim downpours of Northern Spain and and the various trials of our first weeks in Morocco, Tafraoute pulled us on. I think it’s fair …

Fertile Roots – dust, wind and permaculture

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On reaching Essaouira and finding the calming campsite mentioned in this post, we finally took some time to unwind. Up until that point we’d barely stayed more than two nights at any one place and dearly needed to stop for a while. Our time at Esprit Nature restored some of our equilibrium and we hoped that moving on afterwards to a permaculture project down the road would continue the settling down process. Fertile Roots, as the foundation is known, is homed on a little piece of land close to the sea some 10km up the coast from Essaouira. Although the hills behind are thick with argan and thuya trees, this little strip of earth is wind-stripped and arid. Its owner, Mark Anstice, bought the land without ever clapping eyes on it and although it could be tempting to call the move foolish, having more sympathy for blind leaps of faith these days, I call it bold. I’d been planning to visit Mark since we first conceived of travelling to Morocco but the track to take …

Pockets full of Rubbish (or How to Entertain Children Whilst Travelling!)

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Despite some of my fears about how the boys would cope with Morocco and travelling in general, on the whole I’d say they’ve managed well. The first week or two were definitely challenging for all of us and particularly our littlest drifter, but since then I’ve been impressed with how the boys have adapted to a life on the move. In some ways, the circumstances of their previous lives have helped with their transition to a transitory way of being; neither of them were in school or kindergarten and, although our days at home were unstructured, we’ve never watched much TV or spent a huge amount of time in front of a screen, so they were both well primed for chunks of boredom. It’s also a huge help that Eli loves to read and will spend entire days immersed in a book, giving only the occasional grunt to signal that he knows we are there at all. Monty has found it harder to occupy himself, especially on some of our longer drives but mostly between …

Stopovers 2

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Time has run away with me and I have not been keeping up with our stopovers! So here are the next ten as far as I can remember… 1. Camping Monfrague This was the first campsite mentioned in this post, that converted us to a more luxurious way of travel. It was positioned in a natural park and although in high season I imagine it might get a bit crowded, it was almost deserted while we were there. Great facilities and beautiful surroundings. Also horses, trees, azure winged magpies… If we hadn’t been trying to get South so quickly, we’d have stayed longer. The boys obviously found it such a relief to not just be parked in some bleak urban car park, that they danced and ran around singing ‘oh what a beautiful day! Everything’s going my way!’ 2. Camping Merida Not our favourite, but perfectly fine. We’d stopped in Merida as there were lots of Roman remains but unfortunately many of them seemed to be closed or not terribly easy to see. The bit of …

Donanas National Park

Campsites and Caterpillars

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Between Salamanca and El Rocio we discovered that staying in campsites in Spain is easier than trying to find aires to park at. In France we’d navigated by finding an aire somewhere in the general direction we were travelling and then heading for it. In Spain, they’re just not as common and seem to only be available at fairly sizeable towns or cities. So we joined a European camping club and downloaded their app. What joy there was to be had reading about the various sites’ provisions of running water, hot showers and electricity; like children in a sweet shop we gleefully pored over our options. So it was that after Salamanca we drove to a campsite on the edge of a natural park. There were horses running about in the field next to us, azure winged magpies hooted and fluttered about the many trees surrounding us; the sunset was golden and the future bright. Overnight we’d become campsite junkies. The next campsite was less romantic but conveniently placed for visiting the Donanas National Park. …

Stopovers

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I’m in danger of forgetting all the stops we’ve made over the course of our journey so far so I thought I’d make a quick list here in the hope that some of this information may help some hapless motorhomer who, like us, set off with no real idea of what they’re doing or where they’re going. To those of you not intending to go off motorhoming around Europe in January the following may be of limited interest. First stop – Dover. Motorhomes are allowed to park along the front. This road is known, I believe, as Marine Esplanade. It goes without saying there are no facilities, it is just a road. Free. Second stop – Disneyland Paris This is just an enormous car park that you pay 20 euros a night to stay in, although after our first night no one came to ask us for more money. I think they pitied us. There are absolutely no (official) facilities in winter but if you’re sneaky you might get away with having a shower in …

Passing through

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After Blois we drive down through the centre of France, sometimes for just a couple of hours at a time and occasionally managing a slightly longer stint. We generally wake up slowly and only manage – frustratingly – to get going around noon. Once or twice with a lot of effort we’ve managed a slightly earlier start. There are always jobs to be done; water to be filled up, loos to be emptied, beds to be taken down and put away, children to entertain and food to be cooked. Due to extreme cold and wet, we have really only ventured out for the odd mooch. We don’t stray far from our little home; we’re not in the lingering phase of our journey yet, we’re compelled at the moment to keep moving. The changing landscape is a constant source of interest to us adults. From flat, vast expanses of land dotted with sparse trees hung with spherical blobs of what looks to be mistletoe, to gradually more undulating fields, then to thickly wooded hills. The character of the buildings changes …

France is shut

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  Sleeping in the Disneyland car park for two nights felt like a test. I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to sleep in such ridiculous circumstances. Despite several layers of clothing, a duvet, three blankets, hot water bottle and hat, I was still freezing. Any skin that was left exposed (my face!) was almost painfully cold. This feat of endurance was conducted in the bleakness of an almost entirely empty car park, under flat grey foggy skies. I cheered myself with the thought that things could only get better. After consulting our various oracles – road map of France, Lonely Planet France, and Camperstop Europe – we point the van in the direction of Blois in high hopes of a less depressing stopover for the night. The aire in Blois itself was closed so we found another a few kilometeres away in Les Montils that had water and somewhere to empty the loo. I looked forward to meeting a few other folk in motorhomes and perhaps wandering into the town for our evening meal. When …

Colin the van

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The biggest job on the list had been ticked off and with that came some relief. It was good to be able to look outside the window of our rented house and see our van parked just outside. It was good to go and sit in it and imagine all there was to come. Having got Colin home we thought it wise to undertake a couple of test runs. Being complete motorhome novices we needed to figure out almost everything about owning one: where to get LPG and how to fill up the bottles; how to fill and empty the water tank, how the fridge worked, how the boiler worked and what to do about the toilet… We found a suitable site in the peak district we guessed wouldn’t be too tricky to get to (ha!) and decided to leave after Rob finished work on Friday. It was already our usual dinner time before we managed to set off. As newly responsible owners we stopped to fill the tyres with air on the way out but the …

The practicalities – finding a home on wheels

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After the ‘I do!’ come the logistics, the planning, the acquiring and de-acquiring. I’m going to attempt to describe some of that in the hope that it might be useful or vaguely interesting to someone out there. I do this with some reservations however as I’m fairly convinced we are not the best people to be giving guidance on practical matters. We have a random, often stress inducing, scatter-gun approach to organising travelling and living in a van for a year. But we have managed to at least buy a suitable vehicle and have a vague idea of where we might go. So, with disclaimers in place, read on… A Home on Wheels I thought that finding a home on wheels would be fairly simple. A brief search through available camper vans and motor homes on Ebay for example, yields a plethora of mobile vehicles from the new, shiny and exorbitantly expensive to the ancient, cheap and probably broken. It is impossible to know where to start, so I just started. I poured over the …