About us and our trip preparations

Hello and welcome to our motorhoming blog which will hopefully provide an entertaining account of our intended travels through Europe in 2015 and beyond.
In the way of introductions, my name is David (55) and my wife of 34 years is Linda (58). We live in Perth, Western Australia and have two wonderful sons, Adam who is recently engaged to be married and Daniel who has been married for four years and whose wife Larissa has just given birth to our first beautiful granddaughter. I have been employed as a teacher at a local Polytechnic college for the past 26 years and Linda has worked in banking in various roles for the last 20 years. We decided after our second Europe by train trip in 2011 that we needed to find a way to see more of Europe with no time constraints on a limited budget. After reading the “Technomadics” blog, we were confident we had found the answer to our travel dilemma – we would travel to the UK and purchase a Motorhome and explore the UK and Europe! As previously mentioned we are not wealthy by any means but we have estimated that we could take early retirement aund motorhome in Europe while subsidised with the rent from our home and our superannuation. The second big issue after the finances was to get around the 90 day Schengen rules. The system would have us needing to move out of Schengen countries every 90 days which would not only prove costly but greatly restrict our movements. Fortunately my mother was born in the UK so I have been able to successfully apply for a UK passport via the ancestry route. Linda was born in Essex immigrating to Australia when she was a child, so there was no problem applying for her passport. We can now call ourselves honorary “Brits” and with British passports in hand are free to stay in the UK and Western Europe for as long as we wish!

Our trip planning has been greatly assisted by the generosity of other motorhome bloggers (Our Tour, Big Momma’s Adventures, Twerntontour, Woolly Wanderers to name a few) and the free advice (and entertainment) they provide. We have found our perfect motorhome via the internet from Elite Motorhomes in Banbury. The van is an Autotrail Tracker RB 6 berth 2013 model (See the ‘Our Motorhome’ page for pictures) and although we have taken a leap of faith paying a deposit without viewing the vehicle we are very confident that Elite are reputable dealers and all will be well?The service Lewis from Elite has provided to date has been excellent.

For navigation and to help us find appropriate parking and overnight stops we will purchase the Tom Tom Caravan and Camper sat nav. We have also installed a number of parking location apps on the IPad. In addition, we have purchased the AutoRoute program and downloaded the thousands of POI’s from the “Europe by Camper” site (thanks Adam and Sophie!). We are going to supplement our electronic maps and parking guides with a range of paper based maps and stellplatz/aire books from Vicarious books online. In our effort to keep the weight down to a minimum, we have recently purchased Lonely Planet guidebooks (ebooks) for each of the countries we are likely to visit and loaded them onto our IPads. We are going to use the packing list from the “Our Tour” site posted by Jason and will no doubt require a great deal of ongoing advise from fellow motorhomers.

At the beginning of the new year 2015 we still need to give notice that we are retiring from two very secure jobs (a decision that was more stressful than we would have believed), find a good tenant to rent our home and find cheap online airline tickets. We also need to come to terms with leaving family and friends (and our new granddaughter Eleanor) for awhile. We have been dreaming of the motorhoming lifestyle for a long time now and we are very confident that most of these initial stresses will pale into insignificance once we are underway.

Our blog is intended to inform family and friends of our progress and experiences however all are most welcome to join us on what we hope to be the journey of a lifetime.

PS. The photo below was taken at the start of perhaps our greatest adventure to date on which we climbed to 4200 metres to visit the Annapurna Sanctuary (Annapurna Base camp) in Nepal, with our Sherpa Anil (but that’s another story!)