Setting Off & Making Time: München to St. Dizier 29-30/03/12

Posted on 3 April, 2012 by jay

There’s no better start to a day than waking up in a motorway layby after sleeping in your car, parked just a few metres from a stainless steel public convenience, with the roar of trucks racing past and a dog whining at you because it desperately needs to take a shit.

And so our trip for 2012 began.

Our first real meal in the van: veggie meatballs and stew

Our first real meal in the van: veggie meatballs and stew

Iva had been teaching a class until 21:00 the previous evening and we’d hit the road around 21:30. I drove until about midnight – which got us almost as far as Stuttgart – before I could feel myself getting tired. We hadn’t made it to France, but still it we’d managed a fair chunk of the 1000km from Munich to Orléans. Plus, we’d both been so excited to start the holiday that staying the night in Munich and setting off bright and early on Friday morning was never an option.

It had taken me quite a while to get to sleep, because the motorway traffic was pretty noisy and the family-sized bottle of Coke Zero I had drunk to keep my mind razor-sharp while driving still hadn’t fully worn off. The first few nights it’s also always a fairly strange experience to be sleeping in a car, with the various noises of night around you and 30cm of space between your face and the roof.

Scratching the Patisserie itch in Lützelbourg

Scratching the Patisserie itch in Lützelbourg

Predictably, the first stop of the day was for breakfast at McDonald’s 5km along the motorway, I’ll hold off on any further details of that 🙂

Soon after we were on the road again, heading for Karlsruhe and crossing the border into France shortly after. Of course, we knew that there wouldn’t be a border crossing of any kind, but we were disappointed to find that there wasn’t even a “You are now entering France” sign.

Giving Lützelbourg the once over

Giving Lützelbourg the once over

Even Austria and Germany manage that, reciprocally. To make up for this distinct lack of ceremony, two French police officers stopped us at a random traffic island a few minutes later and asked to see our passports. They were particulary interested in Iva’s passport, asking her if her German visa was, in fact, not a visa, but rather a notice of detention prohibiting her from leaving the city of Munich. We responded in the negative. After an embarassing silence, we drove on.

It was around this time that we were deliberating on a fundamental aspect of this year’s road trip: to motorway, or not to motorway?

French country roads are great

French country roads are great

For our trips in 2010 and 2011 we’d relied on Iva’s Garmin GPS, despite it crashing regularly and occasionally sending us in completely the wrong direction. Driving cross country in Hungary one time it detoured by about 50km and attempted to have us cross a chain bridge that was no longer there. This year I’d bought CoPilot Plus for my smartphone, which promised to be altogether more up to date and dynamic. One thing that it does automatically is offer you various route alternatives (not good for indecisive drivers) … the fastest, the shortest, etc.

Random nap stop - near Marbache

Random nap stop - near Marbache

From past experience we knew that the motorways in France are expensive and visually barren. Given our realistic top speed of 115km/hour and the fact that the non-motorway route suggested was considerably shorter, we decided to make a point of avoiding toll roads for the whole holiday. It only took a couple of hours for this to prove to be an excellent decision: so far the country roads in France have been straight and fast and beautiful (and the French drivers fault-free, so far).

Parked up in St. Dizier

Parked up in St. Dizier

We spent the next night in St. Dizier and made a stop in a nice little town called Lützelbourg for a croissant and a baguette. And then another croissant. In St. Dizier we parked up in a residential car park near the canal – which proved to be a nice, quiet place to sleep – and headed into town for dinner.

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Frenchland, Here We Come!

Posted on 29 March, 2012 by jay

For two months we’ve been counting the days like kids waiting for Christmas and at last today’s the day. At 21:00 – when Iva’s finished teaching her last class of the semester we’ll be hitting the road France-bound in the general direction of Orléans.

We spent yesterday evening and this morning packing the van and emptying our apartment, which we’re subletting while we’re away. Experience paid off in both respects: we packed less, but more quickly and (hopefully) more wisely than in the past.

Tonight we’re planning to drive to the German border and sleep roadside somewhere in the vicinity of Karlsruhe, then tomorrow morning we’ll carry on west to Orléans. In total it’s a 9,5 hour drive to what will be our first overnight stop in France. Woohoo!

Frenchland, Here We Come!

Frenchland, Here We Come!

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Getting Proactive Part 2: Cleaning Out 3 Years’ Worth of Random Junk.

Posted on 28 March, 2012 by jay

Tomorrow’s the big day and we’re both stupidly overexcited and a bit silly from it. You can tell when either Iva or I is a little too excited because we tend to talk even faster than usual, and mostly nonsense. After work this evening we’ll pack the van and clear some of our personal stuff out of the apartment (since we’ll be subletting) and then tomorrow evening around 9pm we’ll hit the road and we are also planning to look for remote jobs as it can help us to remain stress free.

Dealing with the dust

Last weekend Iva did her fair share and tackled the dirt and dust and random junk that had accumulated in camperissimo over the last two years. The inside of the van is quite a small space, but emptying everything out and cleaning all of the various nooks and crannies was a surprisingly arduous job.

In the process we also relocated a variety of items we’d lost over the last two years and cleared out quite a bit of food from the various trips of 2010 and 2011.

 

 

 

Lots of strange and unusual foodstuffs

Lots of strange and unusual foodstuffs

 

 

My assigned responsibility this past week was consuming as much of the array of canned food that we’d discovered as possible.

This included: green beans from France, chickpeas from Italy, lentils from Romania and some god-awful vegetarian pâté we bought in Croatia. Since all of the food had been left in the van throughout the winter it had all frozen and defrosted multiple times. Still, not one to be put off by mysterious and unexpected consistencies and smells, I soldiered on and ate most of it.

My reward will be filling the van with a whole new batch of strange food at the first Hypermarché we happen by once we’re in France. Speciality mustard! World-class cheese! Baguette!

 

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Getting Proactive Part 1: Dealing with the Rust

Posted on 20 March, 2012 by jay

This past weekend we enjoyed a burst of proactive energy thanks to the warm, sunny weather. As a result I took a leap of faith an attempted to tackle some not particularly threatening but ugly looking rust along the rocker panel on one side of the van and Iva emptied and cleaned out the entire van.

A smallish spot of rust

A smallish spot of rust

The main challenge with repairing the rust damage was that I have absolutely no idea how to repair rust damage. That said, that’s precisely how a million wonderful journeys of discovery have started in my life*, so I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

*Like the time I cheerfully hacksawed my way through the freon pipe in my fridge and had to evacuate my apartment for an hour.

I started by buying a sanding attachment for my handheld power drill and proceeding to sand the hell out of the various brown bits along the bottom of the van until all the brown was gone. Mostly this went smoothly, but underneath the biggest area of brown I discovered more brown, and underneath that: air … aka a hole.

What can only be described as a patch of rust

What can only be described as a patch of rust

Obviously, at some point in the van’s history someone had slightly dented and scratched this part of the body and then just painted over the dent. Fast forward through 10 years of water and salt and quite a bit of the metal had rusted away. Fortunately the holes were relatively small and concentrated in one 20cm area, so it seemed realistic to have a go at dealing with them without the supervision of a professional. Or a real adult.

Next stop: Hornbach, for some DIY advice and several bottles of chemicals with intimidating pictures of skulls and crossbones on the side.

Derusted and holes filled, now I just have to sand this bit and paint over it

Derusted and holes filled, now I just have to sand this bit and paint over it

I was surprised to find out that no-one at Hornbach was able to tell me exactly what to buy, or how to solve the problem, although they did have quite a selection of products which were obviously intended for ths task at hand. I proceeded to read the instruction on the various pots and bottles and after some head-scratching I opted for the “complete repair kit”, with a litre of very dangerous liquid of some sort, a tube of dangerous paste of some other sort and two big pieces of nylon.

This will be fun, I chuckled to myself!

I also bought some “rust converter” to turn the nasty rust into some more amenable cousin-of-rust. Back in the van I already had two cans of spraypaint to cover up whatever mess may result from my attempts to do good.

Just need to touch up the paint and we're done!

Just need to touch up the paint and we're done!

Joking aside, it actually went quite well, once I’d figured out that I had bought some sort of fibre glass. Applying it was very much like making papier maché (10: dip …. 20: stick … 30: goto 10), only this was evil papier maché which gave off fumes that made my head feel tingly.

Although I don’t have any convincing “after” pictures to prove it, the results for the most part were excellent. After a coat of paint there was no sign of the damage at all, although I did manage to get paint on my new trousers. And on my new shirt.

There’s a lesson to be learned there, I think.

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We’re Putting a Bit More Thought Than Usual Into This Year’s Route

Posted on 16 March, 2012 by jay

Over the last few days we’ve been putting an unusual amount of thought into the route we’ll be driving in April. Our Lonely Planet and Rough Guide arrived last week and we’ve been reading them through, one region a night, and choosing a couple of places each that we’d be interested in visiting.

Planning the Route for Real This Time!

Iva demonstrating our method for planning the route for real this time

In fact, we’ve actually gone so far as pinning a map to our living room wall and sticking post-it notes to keep track. Iva was kind enough to pose for a photo with the map to demonstrate.

This is just one of the ways we’re approaching this trip differently that the past few, and there are a few different reasons.

First and foremost, this will be our last trip for a while, and probably our last ever in Camperissimo.

The main reason is – I’m very happy to say – that in September we’ll be having a baby and so there’s no chance of another big trip for a least another year after that. That being the case, we’re also planning on selling the van at the start of May.

We’ve made a ton of improvements over the last two years and as a result of last year’s events the engine was completely replaced for a much newer one and we still have a year of warranty on all of that work. Since we would hardly be using the van anyway we’ve decided to trade it in for a “normal car” for 18 months and then hopefully buy another van in 2013. I’m a big fan of the D-Line Pössl models,  although it would be a stroke of luck to find a reasonably priced one second-hand.

I think we’re also learning from the last few trips we’ve made.

Our first big tour around Romania and Bulgaria was an amazing experience, but we could have done with a bit more background knowledge, occasional campsite stops to recharge mentally and – maybe partly for those reasons – a whole month was a little bit too long.

With our trip along the Adriatic coast last year we just followed the coast, which made planning very easy, but by the time we got to Greece we felt a little bit disorientated and unsure of how to spend the 3-4 days we were able to spend there. And again, we found that 20-25 days would have been enough.

On the other hand we don’t want to lose sight of the best experiences we’ve had so far, and more importantly, how these came about: by chance.

The most lasting memories have been of the places, things and people we stumbled upon by chance (like the beach in Sköder, the monument in Shumen, the beaches in Vama Veche or sleeping outside ancient Corinth). If we had been travelling according to a fixed day-by-day plan we would have missed out on a lot of these, and of course there’s also the risk that through precise planning you lose that sense of freedom and adventure altogether.

So what have we decided on so far?

  • We’ll be setting off in exactly two weeks on the 30th March in the morning, driving an entire day to arrive in Orléans in central France.
  • From there we’ll drive along the Loire valley through Tours to Angers
  • Then it’s north to Brittany: Mont Saint Michel and then Roscoff to meet my good friend Pete, who’ll be taking the ferry over from Plymouth.
  • Brest will be the last stop in Britanny, then south along the Atlantic coast through Bordeaux and La Rochelle to the Spanish border
  • Meeting the camper van friends that we met in Romania in Irun in Basque country
  • The heading east along the Pyrenees through Carcassone to Montepellier
  • And then home!

Here’s the latest map … 🙂

    Route For April 2012, version 2

    Posted in Camper Trip April 2012, Places & Routes, Random Musings | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments