All posts filed under: Travelling with Children

Vanlife remembered

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We’ve been home now for over a month. I say ‘home’ but for us as a family right now, this is a vague concept that seems to merely mean not living in a van that moves every few days. At the moment this place of non-moving is my dad’s house, the house that I grew up in. Our presence here is signified by the noise and mountains of life-crud now crammed into his formerly quiet and ordered, if a little eccentric, single pensioner’s life. My dad has lived in this place since before I was born and has never (to my knowledge) had any plans to go anywhere else. While I have moved my children about almost constantly over the last couple of years, my own childhood home has barely changed. Rob finds it bemusing that we are now taking baths in the very same bathtub I sat in as a teenager; watching our feet resting on the same taps that I rested my feet upon some twenty years ago. I have found it strangely …

From a van, somewhere in the Pyrenees

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I’m aware that there has been far too long a gap in my postings and, for those who are still interested in our wanderings, I apologise for being absent from this blog for so long. Right now, we’re nestled on the edge of the Pyrenees, covered in blankets, the boys gazing up excitedly at snow covered peaks towering around us. And I still have much to tell, and so many pictures to share from our journey but there are various factors that have been affecting my ability to post. Back in Croatia, I started to feel some awkwardness about writing of our own travels away from home – the difficulties and the excitements – when so many people were, and still are, undertaking journeys of survival; leaving their homes behind them to seek safety and refuge. I was moaning about tedious border crossings in the van, while at the same time thousands of refugees were waiting in Hungarian train stations, arriving at desperately pressured Greek islands, travelling across treacherous seas, and trying to find rest …

Friendship, a story (For Julia)

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At first glance, we may not be an obvious match. She, with one more child than me and therefore two years extra sleep deprivation, always looks a million dollars. I favour the dishevelled look. Her home is spotless, with shiny crumb-free surfaces and clothes smelling laundry-liquid-fresh. Even before my home was a van, my hygiene standards were ‘relaxed’. She moves quickly and busily, I slower and more ponderous. It’s no surprise that her thyroid is over-busy and mine can’t be arsed. She and I met when we were pregnant, her body coping well with the extra demands of gestating a life, mine struggling to support my disproportionately massive belly and the behemoth growing inside. It was at an antenatal class which fortunately turned out to be full of people who got along. We were but a roomful of innocents, our heads still full of fuzzy images of snuggly sleeping babies and ‘family’ times. We couldn’t have known that we were standing at the threshhold of a world full of chaos. In those first awful weeks …

The Bears of Kuterevo

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I’m a bit obsessed with bears and wolves. One of the reasons I’m spellbound by deer is that the idea of something so big wandering around wild in the woods is just so exciting. They’re so big! And they’re owned by no one! So obviously being in places where there are wolves or bears, which are way more exotic and wild and potentially dangerous, is pretty mind-blowing for me. The chances of us actually seeing a bear in the wild though are thankfully fairly slim, so we opted for the next best thing and went to the bear sanctuary in Kuterevo. The Kuterevo bear sanctuary was set up in 2002 by Ivan Crnkovic-Pavenka to give a home to orphaned bears that  otherwise wouldn’t have survived in the wild. It has since grown to accommodate four large enclosures and supports a permanent community of international volunteers. The site provides trees, pools and caves for the bears to live a life as close to wild as they’ll ever know and simultaneously a sense of community and purpose …

Banos de Fortuna – How we Travel

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There are travellers who have ‘bucket lists’, a list of places they want to visit before they die. Pinterest is full of these things – glamorous pictures of exotic destinations – often followed by the exclamation ‘That’s one for the bucket list!’ or some such thing. Some travellers research the area they are planning to visiton the internet, checking for places of interest or ‘things to do with children in X’. Many travellers go to their favourite trusted guide book, usually Lonely Planet or Rough Guides. But we follow none of these methods. In making our decisions about where to go, we consult the bible of motorhoming, Camperstops Europe 2015. We have a vague idea about the direction we want to go and how long we want to drive for, then check the maps in the front of this fine book to find a suitable stopping place. Travelling this way, we have come across places we never would have happened upon otherwise. It has taken us to quiet towns, bustling ports, mountain views and beach …

Cabo de Gata

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Cabo de Gata, a small section of the Spanish coast where nature comes before tourism. A natural park, a protected oasis for wildlife; a place of deserts and deserted beaches, sandy coves and quiet villages and small towns. We went there on a tip off, and spent almost two weeks parked on or near beaches, wandering across arid hills full of wild thyme amongst bright flowers and pacing beaches restlessly through a spell of bad weather.   The calls of birds were our first impressions; from the natural saltwater lagoons mysterious bird calls and hootings filled the air but the reeds kept the singers hidden. We lay in bed and listened to what we thought were geese crying overhead and later realised they were flamingoes passing in flocks of red and pink feathers; surprisingly noisy, gangly and graceful. Here on this little protected toe of land, jutting out from the otherwise concrete encased Costa del Hell, we found long dark stretches of sand with barely a soul to be seen. The boys rolled in the …

Stopovers 4 Merzouga to El Morreon

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#31 Kasbah Hotel Jurassic, Ziz Gorge We stopped here on our way north from Merzouga as I was insistent that we needed somewhere to break up the hours and hours of driving. I’ll be honest, it felt a little odd as we pulled in. There were no other motorhomes and the young man who moved the barrier seemed a bit bewildered by us being there at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hardly ever saw a motorhome, so eerily unaccustomed they seemed to having people stay at their campsite. Having said all that, the showers were amazing and the landscape too. It took me a while to realise just how stunning our surroundings were which made me worry we were starting to take it all for granted. We only stayed one night and when I went to pay the next morning they weren’t able to give me any change. It was a small amount so I said it didn’t matter. Then as we were driving out, the bewildered looking young man came out with …

The Alpujarras, Orgiva and a birthday

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After bidding one set of grandparents a tearful goodbye in Granada, we drove off to Orgiva in the Alpujarras, an almost legendary place of beauty and alternative living. We’d heard about its little hippy camps that had sprung up there since the 1970s and how that community had grown with more and more dreamers turning up every year, their heads filled with visions of freedom and sunshine. We wondered what we, always with one eye out for a different kind of life, would find there. Would we feel a pull to this sunny mountain idyll as so many before us had? Even as we drove into the lovely little campsite just before Orgiva, surrounded by the hills of the Alpujarras, we felt a wave of positivity. We had another grandparental visit due in just over a week at Velez Malaga, not too far from where we already were, so we decided to spend the intervening time in and around Orgiva. It was the longest we’d stopped anywhere in all our travels up to that point. …