All posts tagged: motorhoming

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 …

A Magical Place called Bicorp

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Europe is well charted territory so it’s always exciting when travelling to come across a place that feels ‘undiscovered’. Bicorp was one of those places. We’d decided we wanted to move inland as we passed Valencia heading north and Camperstop Europe suggested there was a cheap place to stop over at Bicorp. We looked it up and saw that there were possibly some cave paintings and reckoned it would work out. A little while later as we drove up the side of a wooded mountain through a series of hairpin bends, I knew we’d done the right thing. Woods and greenery had not been a feature of our Spanish explorations up until that point. Dry, brown and somewhat barren had been the general trend and the experience of suddenly being deep in green was thrilling. I continued to be thrilled by Bicorp and its surrounding area. Although the town itself isn’t quaintly beautiful, there was something about it that gave me butterflies. It sits on a little rise of land surrounded on three sides by …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Dover to Disneyland

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We got to Dover just before midnight. Driving along the front we spotted other motorhomes tucked up for the night and parked near one. It felt so good to make up our bed that night, right there at the side of the road and sweeter still to wake to the sound of seagulls calling the morning in. There wasn’t time for much before we had to make our way to the ferry. The lorries from the night before were all still stacked along the approach to the dock; the drivers, grey and crumpled, rubbed at their faces wearily. We, relatively fresh and rested, were increasingly giddy with the expectation of our imminent crossing. Driving through the various gates, we cheered at everything and marvelled at the giant boats that would swallow us up along with the now comparatively teeny juggernauts, then spit us out on foreign shores. Once on deck, we grinned and jigged and ran about. The boys, who had been feeling concerned about the possibility of sinking, were reassured by the scale and …

Bad Omens

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It should have been a relaxing and pleasant stroll through one of our country’s most historically interesting woodlands. I was looking forward to the few hours of idle chatter with a friend I don’t get to see very often while our children did the stuff that children are supposed to do in the woods. I imagined I might even get to take some photos of coppiced trees making wintry silhouettes and shadows in the mist and sun. But we were a family on  the brink of leaving the country for some time. The boys had been bed hopping for a few nights while saying their various goodbyes. I hadn’t allowed for them or us, understandably, not feeling quite right. So what followed was a series of unfortunate events. Emergency toilet trips, an asthma attack, disgruntled children. Eli had his head wounded by Rob bouncing a tree bough down on him and we couldn’t park at the cafe so had to park too far away for tired children. We were exhausted and out of sorts and …