All posts tagged: 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 …

Sky Mirrors – The Ebro Delta

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(if you’d like to hear a soundtrack to these pictures, go to the bottom of the page and click the You Tube vid.) Due to a bit of a mix up on our part, we found that we had longer to hang about after Bicorp than we thought. We’d arranged to go and visit a friend at Finca Slow, a permaculture/regenerative olive farming operation, but  somehow we’d got it into our heads that it was much further away from us, close to the French border. In fact, it is not far from Tarragona, south of Barcelona and only a couple of hour’s drive away. When it dawned on us (hanging about doing very little on the coast at that point) that we actually had about five days to kill, we were forced to do a bit of a re-think. In our usual haphazard manner, we looked at the book, and just picked a couple of places in the area to stop at. One of these places turned out to be the remarkable Ebro Delta. Allowing the …

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 …

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. …

10 Things to be Aware of When Visiting Morocco

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#1 The roads The roads, other than the big toll motorways, are pretty bad. Admittedly probably not so bad if you’re in a car rather than a 22ft motorhome, but even then they’re a long way off what I’m used to. One of my main gripes was width, with even major roads only just wide enough for two cars to pass each other and certainly not a whole lot of breathing space. Potholes, of which there are many, are another major nuisance with some roads seeming to consist mostly of pothole and not much else. The edges of many of the roads are strangely broken away so that if you did want to give that enormous coach hurtling towards you at 100 mph a little more room, you’d fall off the mini-cliff at the edge of the road and crash anyway. It all makes for some pretty hairy driving at times but as I say a car would not be quite as problematic as a motorhome. #2 Coaches If I went to Morocco again I …

Photoblog – Azrou, Volubilis & Chefchaouen

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Given that the blog is now approximately eight weeks behind our actual lives, I’m attempting to cover some ground with this photoblog. The chronology is a little out but apart from Fez these three places were our last stops in Morocco and we drove like people possessed to get round them before we had to zoom off to Spain to see waiting grandparents. I’m going to wrap up the Morocco adventures with the next two posts and then it’ll be all about Espana! But for now enjoy these last few piccies (and Rob’s little debut) – especially the ones of Chefchaouen, which was a total treat for a lass that likes to take photographs. Azrou Volubilis – Rob I used to be an archaeologist, and while I got tired of scraping around in the earth looking for tiny fragments of pottery, I retain a high level of geekery about ancient sites. I was very excited about visiting Morocco; the place is littered with remarkable remnants of the Roman Empire which I had been taught about …

Fez

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Fez was to be our last big stop before we left Morocco to meet my parents in Southern Spain and we drove almost the entire length of the country to get there. Leaving the baking desert at Merzouga, we stopped only briefly at Azrou for a spot of monkey-bothering and once for an overnight rest at the Ziz Gorge, passed by the still snowy Atlas mountains and arrived in Fez only three days later. We were determined that our Fez experience wouldn’t be a repeat of our Marrakech misery and, to that end, we booked into a guesthouse within the medina itself, hoping to be able to give ourselves up to the sensory onslaught of the souks, then slip back into the calm of the dar (like a riad)* and recover. Our customary frugality was also abandoned for the weekend as we knew it would all be much more enjoyable if we could enter into some friendly haggling. To help us start our aquaintance with Fez without getting immediately lost, the guesthouse owner Brian met …

Painted Rocks and Punctures

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As it turned out, we entirely missed the almond blossom festival; not from arriving too late, as we’d feared, but in fact because we were two weeks early. We enjoyed Tafraoute so much, however, that it didn’t seem to matter that we were going to be leaving before the festvities began. Staying for nearly a week meant that we could adventure out beyond our immediate surroundings, and make a couple of guide-book suggested visits. Getting out to the painted rocks on our bikes was an opportunity for us to get out properly into the landscape. Having only biked between the van and the town, I think we were all eager to go on an expedition into the curious lumpy outcrops that characterise Tafroute’s surroundings. Rob and I canvassed opinion from fellow motorhomers and consulted various websites and guides on the exact distance to the rocks and the time it would take. As all parents know, cycling or walking with children is all fabulous fun until everyone gets tired and whiny and then something enjoyable becomes …