Introduction

This blog covers our year and a half long trip touring southern Europe and will be added to with more travels in future.

Trip Plan

The overall aim for our route was to follow where the weather was nice throughout the year. Whilst we travel we are keen to be outdoors as much as possible and to be active using our bikes, walking boots, bodyboard and Matt's windsurf kit that we have on board. We park overnight for free as much as possible and using Aires (motorhome stopovers) to keep the costs down due to a relatively small budget.

Before leaving, our final rough plan for the trip was to have one month away spending some time on the south-west Atlantic coast of France then the Algarve and southern Portugal to get some sun, return to the UK in January for Matt to finish work on his PhD thesis and to finish preparing for the main part of the trip, then continue touring again as soon as possible. Setting off for the second time in late April we would first cover Italy from north to south, get a ferry over to Greece then travel north through eastern Europe and across central Europe. In the autumn we started travelling south via France down one side of Spain/Portugal. In the following New Year we had hoped to get over to Morocco (but this didn't work out) before travelling back up the other side of Spain/Portugal coming into France in the spring before returning to the UK. Depending on time and finances we thought may continue beyond a year away, covering some more of central and northern Europe. You can read a more detailed summary of our journey route on Our Journey Route page.

Budget

You may think that a tour like this would cost a fortune, which it could, but we worked to a budget of just £10k for a year for the two of us, with a contingency for overspend. This amount was worked out using our costs recorded on a previous short European trip and extrapolated for the longer duration. The result worked out to be within a few hundred pounds of what Adam and Sophie of EuropebyCamper.com spent on their similar year-long travels which confirmed it was a reasonable target. This budget was to include all of our costs except for several upfront costs that had already been paid for, which included the first years' travel insurance, motorhome insurance, road tax and MOT.

The Blog

We posted one or two updates on here each week of where we’d been and what we’d done including photos from along the way. As we didn’t set up this website until after the start of the second part of our tour, the first month away in France and Portugal was written up from our daily logs by Jo whilst we were back in the UK while Matt was working, and was posted first, before catching up to date. We kept accurate records of costs so were able to report on that too.

Thanks for reading and happy travels,
Matt & Jo