Wednesday 23 March 2011

Welcome

Dear family & friends, we are off on our adventure on the 4th April for 3 months travelling around Europe in our motor home. We will be posting news of our progress and adventures periodically here in our blog. We have absolutely no idea how this blog is going to work out as neither of has done one before, however, we hope it will be an interesting and perhaps  amusing diary of two old fogies bumbling around Europe with no real sense of direction and not a clue what any of the locals are saying . To overcome the language barrier I intend to fall back on the tried and tested English method of dealing with Johnny Foreigner......a patronising smile, lots of hand gestures and above all....shout (because all foreigners are deaf) in English that you don’t speak the lingo and could they please go and find someone who can talk properly, there’s a good chap. I expect that Fang, being a social worker, will prefer a more gentle approach and try to get to know them first, but I don’t think it’s necessary to get to know people before you start telling them what to do......

The outline plan is to travel down the west of France, over the Pyrenees into northern Spain, follow the northern coast of Spain and drop down into Portugal (drop down is a term we seasoned travellers use for ‘heading south’ and has nothing to do with falling over). We will then work our way down through Portugal and back into the south of Spain. The plan here is to ‘sort of’ head back north through the middle of Spain and back over the Pyrenees via Andorra. We are not entirely sure how long this is going to take as there are a lot of unknowns, such as....afternoon naps, sleep-ins, arguments resulting in ‘no talking’ for extended periods, left hand turns which should have been right hand turns and a general melee of getting lost, finding ourselves and then getting lost again. We keep saying to each other that we are going to be ‘fluid’ in our plans.....but if you visualise two old jellies wobbling around Europe you should get the picture.

So, the guide books and maps have been bought, a loading manifest for the van has been drawn up, TomTom has been set for Lisbon, clean nickers stowed and with phrase book in hand we are off to see the world.