All posts tagged: Hymer

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 …

Stopovers 6 – Peniscola to St Chinian

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#51 Camping La Volta, Peniscola This stop was listed in Camperstops Europe as a five euro stopover but was actually a campsite with campsite prices (albeit very reasonable ones). Peniscola seems to have lots of cheapish campsites and although it’s an established beach resort, is not without its charms. There’s an absolutely huge stretch of sandy beach and a very pretty old town complete with hilltop castle as well as the usual resort distractions. We didn’t expect to love it, but we were surprised by how much we liked it. #52 Camperstop at La Casa de Fusta, Ebro Delta  This was a totally unexpected find and turned out to be a real highlight. The Ebro Delta is a fascinating place and the visitor centre, complete with camperstop, has plenty to offer everyone; a fantastic restaurant, punting, museums, wildlife watching, boating, cycling and plenty more. The camperstop is fully catered for and costs around 5 euros a night. There’s plenty of space and you can spot rare and exciting birds from the comfort of your van! …

Ait Ben Haddou

Photo blog – Taliouine to Todra

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In between what you see in these pictures, imagine us undertaking more crazy six hour drives up barely surfaced mountain roads in second gear. Imagine children running alongside our van sometimes waving, sometimes throwing stones and sometimes making *ahem* lewd gestures. Imagine us waiting for herds of goats just lying in the road. Imagine us taking detours more suited to a tank than a classic Hymer, where flooded rivers have blown the roads out. Imagine us stopping for lunch and shopping at a market where there are sheep’s heads piled on the floor outside the butcher’s stall. Imagine us wandering a town that’s featured in movies, where only a few people live but there’s a rug salesman around every corner. Imagine an American film crew running up and down steps in the heat of the afternoon, their sound guy looking as if he could do with some medical help. Imagine us walking through lush palmeries, heavy with the scent of almond blossom, where quietly intent people toil at their perfect little patches of fertile earth. …

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 …

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 …