Here is a picture of our old Compass magnum and our new Burstner Nexxo

 

Well just packing the MH for our trip to France next Saturday and checking the tyres and anything else that needs to be done, will have to put the bikes on the back on Friday night when I finish work as we are hitting the road early Saturday morning.
I don't  know whether to stay with the M1 -M25 or have a change and go down the A1 then the M25.
we are booked on the 15:50  euro tunnel then when we arrive in Calais we will go straight to the Auchen supermarket fill up with cheap French diesel, get any supply's we need  for the weekend (beer, wine) then spend the night at the yacht basin.
then the plan on Sunday is to head through Belgium to Luxembourg where we can top up with even cheaper fuel and may see what other duty free goods there is worth getting there.
Sunday night will be spent at the aire in Metz   http://www.metz.fr/lieux/lieu-1941.php , but all that could change it just depends on the weather forecast so we might end up going south.

 

In July 2013we decided to treat ourselves to a new motorhome after looking at hundreds of vans we decided on the burstner nexxo t660, we chose this model because it had the perfect layout for our needs.
it has a very nice comfy fixed French bed much better than making up the bed in our old compass magnum.

we have had a couple of weekends in the dales but the big test will be in late September when we travel to Alsace for 3 weeks, I hope to get internet connection while we are there and try to keep the blog updated.

some pictures from the dordogne

                        Chateau de Beynac

the view of rocamadourthat's our motorhome right in the middle of the picture

                                                                    

Its been a long time

Well it’s been a long time since I’ve posted on here in fact it’s been a couple of years.

In the last couple of years we have done about 4 trips to France the last one was in May 2013 to the Dordogne the weather wasn’t that good but we had a great couple of weeks, from there we travelled up to Normandy for a couple of days and visited several war museum’s and then onto Ypres for the last couple of days and went to see the last post at Mein gate what a very moving experience it was.

 

We set of from cambrils about 8am heading back into France; we had planned to spend a week making our way home but due to unforeseen circumstances we had to head home straight away.

 I carried on driving all day stopping for short breaks, getting to the outskirts of Paris about 11pm we decided to stop for a bit of sleep, while parked up trying to sleep a car started to drive round the service area stopping to check us out, so we moved on getting to Calais about 3am. After booking on the 9 am ferry I parked up in the lane and was just about to drop off to sleep when we were awoken by one of the ferry staff telling us we could get on this ferry.

We arrived in Dover about 6 am and drove straight home, walking through the front door at 11:30.

Never again am I going to drive like that.

   this is the route we took, notice the detour

From escala we decided to go further down the coast and stopped a big site that was quite expensive called cambrils park, www.cambrilspark.es we had stop there several years ago and really enjoyed it. Got to the site and booked in for 4 nights picked our pitch from the site map.

When we got settled we had a walk about and found that the place had turned into a bit of a dump. But we had paid so we had to stop. After 4 days I was glad to get out of there, and started the drive north back into

the pool area at cambrils park

                                

Day 5

Set off early and started to drive towards Toulouse, not knowing where we are going makes it quite an adventure. Was having a Nice steady drive when trucks started flashing lights at me from behind, so I pulled over and went to the back of the van.  The doors where open, but luckily nothing had been lost. at the back of the van it is boarded off for a storage area for the chairs and leads and other stuff.

Anyway carried on driving and decided to go into Spain, when we crossed the border we carried on until we ended up at a place call escala, and found a site called www.campinglescala.com. The facilities where 1^st class with a brand new toilet block so ended stopping for 4 nights.

Day 4

We set off about 10:00am in the morning and had no idea where we were going the only plan was to head south towards Spain, after driving for several hours a realised I had taken the wrong motorway. So decided to find a site for the night we ended up at

www.camping-le-futuriste.fr we stopped for the night and left in the morning.

Day 2

The next morning we set off again heading for a place called honfleur we arrived late afternoon and found a campsite just on the edge of the town the weather was great so we stopped for a couple of days and put the drive away awning up and went to explore the area.

Many ancient belfries are free standing because they attracted lightning. It is better to lose a belfry than a church. This one is covered by weather panelling and looks like it has a slate roof. Note the external support beams. The bell-ringer used to live in the lower floor. The inside support wood work is also interesting.

1ST Trip to Europe

Day 1

Well it was 6:00 am Friday morning and we left home for Dover to catch the 18:00 Seafrance to Calais. we left early as we expected some problems of some kind but no, all went well and we ended up getting an earlier ferry.

We had no sites booked in France so we just drove for 30 minutes and came across a little site call campsite des trolls. Not bad for a 1 night stopover.

    a tree at the campsite des trolls.

Our first trip in Ollie

Ollie was our self build motor home, I purchased an mwb iveco daily panel van from the auctions. And over the next 18 months converted it into a motor home, with the help of the SBMCC web site it turned out better than expected.

We had our first trip to Wales.  www.fronfarmcaravanpark.co.uk

It was the weekend before Easter 2010, and the weather was fantastic.

We stayed for 2 days and were very proud of our efforts, now Europe was our oyster.

This is me and my wife Lesley taken somewhere in Normandy on our fist trip in our motorhome

About us

hi, we are Alan and Lesley from Manchester
we started motorhoming about 2 years ago after building our own self build motorhome that took us 18 months to build. we then drove it through france to spain and back and now we have traded it in for a 2007 compass avangarde 400r.
this blog is just to keep a record of our trips for anyone that would like to read it. i will try to keep it updated as best as i can, as i am not an I.T. type of person.