Never before have we started a trip with so little planning. Really – apart from rough ferry times we have no idea where we are going to go. We’re thinking of going to Holland and Amsterdam (yeah yeah – as usual J) and then some areas we haven’t seen, then across to Germany to cover some parts we’ve missed, and then up to Denmark. No idea how long we’ll be, but if there is time we may drop back down to Dresden and then to Prague – but as to whether we make it your guess is as good as mine. Actually, your guess will be better as you may be able to read ahead!
Though we’ve not been on a major trip for a few months due to house sale and stuff, we have been out and about using the van for shortish breaks. As such its been kept ready to go and for this trip no real preparation was taken! Okay, I checked the oil and tyre pressures, and also made sure we have enough tread to be legal – as at 34,000 miles we are still on the original tyres! We will change them to full snow tyres when we get back to UK.
The only real change is to our gadget collection – we have a new lighter laptop that lasts ages on Battery (Asus UL30), long range WiFi aerial to allow us to access the web easier, and an iPod touch which is great for discreet walking and WiFi scanning and of course keeping up to date with emails with ease.
On this trip we plan to wild-camp and use aires as much as possible – the van is quite capable to be great away from campsites so we intend to be self sufficient as much as possible. We find this gives us a much more natural view of a place rather than be stuck on a site. Also as we are just exploring an area, we know some places we want to visit, but others are either recommendations or simply navigating to an aire guides us to areas we’d not otherwise explore. For us, “Wild Camping” just means parking overnight somewhere, ideally (but not always!) somewhere stunningly beautiful and leaving our spot as we found it.
So, with TomTom updated, latest speed cameras uploaded, and all the latest GPS POI databases I’ve created loaded – we just set TomTom to Calais and off we go!