Follow our progress as Twernt travels to the south of Europe to escape our British winter of 2014/2015.
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Follow our progress as Twernt travels to the south of Europe to escape our British winter of 2014/2015.
Twernt On Tour - Phase Four 
Hiya Roy, another good job well done. We’re going to do a similar trip next month, but over a period of 8 weeks initially. Is there any particular reason for you choosing to go down the west? I planned on going Cherbourg, Perpignan, Barcelona, South Coast, Portugal, Biarritz, then up the coast of France in April.
Cheers for now,
Nick.
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Hi Nick, we only went down the west side of France because we visited Amanda’s sister in the Vendee – we’re undecided about the return trip as we’re planning to do one month in France – may go along to Frejus and then over to Grenoble but we’d also like to visit the Dordogne area – then again, we do like beaches! You’ll be doing in 8 weeks what will have taken us 6 months+! The memories are made ‘thick and fast’ when you move on quite quickly – beats staying in one place for too long – providing you can cope with memory overload! Hope that you have a great trip, we’re already looking forward to our next adventure – Scotland around April/May is beckoning! Cheers, Roy
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Hi Roy
Finding your blog really interesting, hope you don’t mind if I ask a few questions? I am planning a long trip down to Dubrovnik going through france,Germany, Italy Slovenia probably starting in April for 5 months or so. So my questions …..
How did you create the map of your route that I see here,
Do you plan the trip, places you want to visit, route, recommendations etc before leaving and if so what tools did you use, I am getting quiet a few ideas by reading blogs but feel they will get lost, there must be a way seasoned travellers sort their ideas and I’m not getting it.
I see you use WordPress for the blog, what do you do when you don’t have wifi
Have you found a way to get wifi 24/7 and if so, how
Any other thoughts would be much appreciated, thank you
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Hi, no problem, easier to answer direct questions that trying to second-guess what should be included in the blog!
The map is a Google Map, you need a Google account and then you can create your own maps; I did this trip one and set it to ‘share’. It does take a bit of fiddling around learning to use the features but it’s quite easy once mastered.
We didn’t plan the trip beyond Calais – it was turn right, visit Amanda’s sister in the Vendee, head for the Algarve ASAP after that visit and then Salobrena for Christmas and now we need to be back in the UK by Easter.
Our first trip of hopefully many future trips.
In addition to escaping the winter cold in the UK, it has been about discovering how we want to structure our future trips – we have now settled on how we want that to be and I shall blog about it v.soon.
As far as tools, etc. are concerned, our best ‘tool’ has been the Snooper SatNav with ‘ACSI’ and ‘Camperstops’ sites ‘built-in’- the Camperstops and ‘All The Aires’ books had me tearing my hair out every time we tried to establish a plan – they are useless.
As for planning – yes, yes, YES! Do all that you can – we should have done more to find suitable campsites for our long vehicle – that would have saved WASTED visits to campsites that were unsuitable (for whatever reason).
The site criteria depicted by the ‘site guides’ is pathetic – so you should create your own list of criterion (preferably structured and priority weighted) and research, research, research using Google to find bloggers and forum comments about how each site meets your requirements. If you have the time you could reduce your search to a list that satisfies ‘must haves’ and then drill down from there – always a good idea to have some back-up sites for the days that you travel (or better still, contact the site in advance and book – unless it’s a ‘wilding’ location!!) – we have often moved on from our ‘planned’ site and, on the worst day, it took until about the 7th site before we decided to stayover (even then, it was rubbish, but we’d had enough for that day!).
Great locations do exist, it’s just building your own library of the ones that are good for whatever fits your requirements.
We have just a few and can see that it would take a few years of winter visits to get a reasonable database of sites that are ‘palatable’ to us. Generally speaking (which is always dangerous!) I would swerve campsites, select only the better aires and try and find those ‘really great’ wilding spots. All of this is only my feelings about Spain/Portugal – it’s different in the UK where we love many of the campsites that we visited – the standards are better than down here.
If I had the time/cba then I would create a database keyed on the first however many characters of coordinates and build my own list of stopovers – everyone has a different view of what they are prepared to accept and if the guides did their job and reported better information then we, the discerning camperstop users, could make better decisions about where we want to stopover.
Wordpress seems to be the biggest blogger platform out there and has plenty of good features that you can employ. When we don’t have WiFi I use ‘Microsoft Windows Live Writer’ which allows blog creation off-line and you can then ‘squirt’ a draft up to WordPress once on-line – I then ‘fiddle’ with the blog in WP before publishing. ‘Writer’ is on my PC so I need EHU to power that – still useful when the on-site WiFi is dreadful (as it mostly is!).
WiFi 24/7 is easy in the UK – MiFi + ‘3’ broadband sim on a monthly contract – and, to a lesser extent, that also works in France (for up to 60 days) – ‘3’ have recently announced that the service will be available in Spain from April and it already exists in 17+ other countries but restrictions apply (check their ever-changing terms).
One day, a super-fast, Euro-wide, non-roaming charges, sim will be available and then it will be happy days – until then it’s UK = good, France = OK (mostly) and Spain = from April.
Aires/campsites should do more to provide a better service but a big investment may have a short-life as other/better solutions come on-line.
Sorry for ranting on about this stuff but I have found it to be ‘primitive’ and it has ‘done my head in’ during this trip.
There’s a big industry here that needs a huge injection of quality standards applied to it, instead of that we have amateurs building guide books and sites that care only about profits. Come the revolution……………..!!!
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