The Launder's big adventure

The trip – a rough plan
Having looked at all the various routes and options for getting to the continent we’ve decided to get a ferry direct to Spain from Portsmouth despite having the Poole-Cherbourg link only just down the road. The reason for this is two-fold, one: it saves the long drive down through France chasing the sun for our November departure and secondly: it means we’ll only travel through France twice on our round-Europe tour. The downside of course is that we may have 36 hours of hell on the winter seas with 3 young (possibly sea-sick) children.

The rough plan so far is:

1. Ferry to Spain, stay a week at the first campsite to acclimatise and relax into our new way of life.
2. Drive along the bottom of Spain to Gibraltar staying at campsites along the way, 1 day driving to every 2-3 days camping.
3. Visit Gibraltar and possibly nip across to Morocco for a day-trip.
4. Camp in southern, middle then northern Portugal.
5. Drive along the top of Spain or through it camping as we go and cross into Andorra.
6. From Andorra camp along the south coast of France to northern Italy.
7. Work our way down through Italy eventually crossing into Sicily.
8. Back to Italy and ferry across to Greece.
9. Through Greece and get a ferry to Cyprus, staying with Ali’s mum for a while.
10. Back to Greece then direct to Croatia via ferry or back up through Italy on the opposite coast then ferry to Croatia.
11. Slovenia.
12. Hungary, Romania.
13. Slovakia.
14. Poland.
15. Lithuania.
16. Latvia.
17. Estonia.
18. Finland.
19. Norway.
20. Sweden.
21. Denmark.
22. Germany.
23. Czech Republic.
24. Austria.
25. Switzerland.
26. France.
27. Luxembourg.
28. Belgium.
29. Holland.
30. Back to blighty!

Oh no! Breakdown
Not long after our second outing, the car started acting as if the battery was low and struggled to turn the engine over at start-up. I put the battery on charge that night and the following morning despite a full battery the car was a non-starter, this was twice as bad as normal because we had a wedding to attend that day. In the end we had to give up the car as dead and ride my scooter to the wedding, no-one believed us when we told them how we’d arrived!

We called Land Rover Assistance the following day, who couldn’t find our vehicle on their database which meant that we might not be covered under their warranty or breakdown service. After taking a credit card number they agreed to come out and attend to the problem while they investigated our warranty coverage.

An engineer came out and worked on the car for 3 hours taking the bumper off and lights out in the process! He couldn’t trace the fault, declaring the battery, fuses and other start related components to be in full working order. Later, the car was recovered onto a flatbed truck, much to the children’s entertainment for further investigation at the main dealer.

The i-mob came in handy at this point allowing me to check the vehicles whereabouts that evening and the next day. I was able to locate the recovery company’s storage site, tell when it was on the road and again once it had been delivered to the main dealer.

As part of the vehicle recovery we’d been provided with a Nissan X-trail to keep us mobile but this definitely wouldn’t be man enough to pull our caravan. The main dealer reported that we required a new starter motor that would arrive in two days time. The next day Land Rover Assistance insisted that we were changed into a Land Rover product which meant moving all the car seats from the X-trail to a new Range Rover. Just as Ali waved goodbye to the X-trail, the dealer rang up to say the starter motor had come a day early and our car was ready for collection! Another car seat transfer later and we were back in our own motor.

2nd trial run
Our second outing was to Highlands Caravan Park near Bridport. We thought we’d try a full service pitch, which includes water & waste hook-up as well as electric. This required us to reverse the caravan onto a fairly small hard standing with a close access road and our first pitch turned out to be too much for us, so we drove off again in search of an easier one. The second pitch was a little easier and our neighbour kindly moved their car so we could get square. Having such a long (26ft) twin axle caravan has disadvantages!

Not having to empty the wastehog or fill the aquaroll all weekend provided an easier life and now we’ve got all the right connections we’ll try and get full service pitches where available. Day 1 was pretty sunny and we managed to get the awning up this time with help only to get it along the rail. Day 2 turned out pretty miserable with howling winds and rain, as the wind got stronger and stronger the awning was definitely looking unstable so we searched for guy ropes only to find the manufacturer kindly provided 12 eyelets and only 2 guy ropes! A swift trip up the shop and we had an awning tie down kit and enough guy ropes to tie down the millennium dome.

I promptly broke off the spiral awning strap peg eyelet whilst screwing it into the ground and the opposite one broke off under the strain an hour later. We decided to leave it to fate and went off swimming in the site’s indoor pool and hope we’d come back to a complete awning. The pool was good but the managers are very anal with the rules allowing no jumping, kid throwing or general fun in its entirety. We came back to quieter winds and our awning still intact to learn that a neighbour’s had actually blown away!

On the way home, Ali had her first go at pulling the caravan driving 10 miles or so on the A35 dual carriageway, she looked nervous but rose to the challenge having admitted later that she would be quite happy for me to do all the driving whilst away!

Sponsors!
Not being backward in coming forward as my granny would say, I wrote emails and letters to all manner of car & caravan related manufacturers explaining our plans and inviting them to sponsor us in whatever way they saw fit.

The first to respond was i-mob.co.uk a company based near Marlow, Buckinghamshire that produce GPS based vehicle tracking and immobilisation systems. After meeting the company, Michael Noble the sales director agreed to fit their top of the line tt4 system to the car and a prototype tt1 system to the caravan. Now we have complete peace of mind knowing that we (or our family) can track the car and caravan anytime and can even immobilise the car if we’re unlucky enough to get car-jacked or the car is stolen.

The second sponsors are Avondale the caravan manufacturers who have agreed to extend the parts warranty to cover Europe, give technical help over the phone and have donated a Blaupunkt CD / radio to entertain us.

The first trial run
We’ve never been to Birchwood Tourist Park before and were delighted to find it right in the middle of Wareham forest with pine trees all around. Our pitch was at the forests edge four minutes walk from the children’s play area and toilet block. The pitch was slightly sloping and the park warden was kind enough to lend us a couple of wooden planks to level up. I got the steadies down and began preparing the van while Ali drove off to fetch the kids.

Upon setting up I discovered that there was a retaining pin missing from one of the bunks, the table clip came off in my hand and we had a propane gas connection with a butane bottle! The campsite allowed us to swap our half empty butane bottle for full propane one just paying the gas charge so we’d be able to have a hot meal that night.

The kids arrived screaming as usual and demanding food, so situation normal. That night we were surprised that they all went to sleep in the same room fairly quickly without too much bother and relaxed with a well-earned bottle of wine.

The following day was awning erection day so we broke out the instructions, poles and material and began trying to make head and tail of it all. We stood around for quite a time scratching our heads as there was no parts list and the diagram definitely didn’t match the amount of poles and fixings we had! Thankfully, our Scottish neighbour came across and offered a hand and 3 hours later it was up. We weren’t going mad after all, the diagram was missing two complete sets of poles and supports!

The rest of the weekend went without much ado apart from the last night where I lay in bed thinking why’s the water pump occasionally going? I got up to check all the taps and lo and behold the kitchen tap was leaking through the body so I had to completely drain the system and be without water for our final day.

Hitching up and leaving turned out to be more of a challenge than arriving as we weren’t aware that we should have vacated our pitch by 11 and were cooking dinner when the next pitch occupants arrived! I apologised and explained or inexperience and the new occupants were very understanding and allowed us to have lunch. When we arrived our pitch was in the middle of a large grassy area, when we came to leave there were campers, caravans and tents everywhere with guy ropes galore and it was quite tricky getting the outfit back to the road.

New toys
We collected the car on the 4th of August, which, within 2 miles of the car showroom decided to reset all the instrumentation and satellite navigation from English back to German! Hoping that this wasn’t the shape of things to come I figured out how to change it back and avoided a trip back to the showroom.

The following weekend I attended the Caravan club’s driving course, which became the first time I’ve ever towed anything. The course (held near Winchester) was excellent and gave me a chance to practice everything before doing it for real as well as gaining insights from the experienced instructors in all things caravan related. I strongly recommend this course for anyone considering towing a caravan for the first time it was invaluable.

We collected the caravan on August 10th near Bristol, which entailed a 3-hour tow back to Dorset. We’d booked the kids into the nursery for the day to allow us to nervously drive the outfit back in peace.

By the time we left, we’d missed lunch and were both ravenously hungry. At one stage Ali suggested pulling into Sainsbury’s but I feared I’d never get the wagon out again so we pressed on keeping our eyes peeled for a truckers café or similar.

Finally we came across a Little Chef that ‘welcomed truckers’ so pulled in. Having heard that some truckers get upset with caravans that pull into their designated spots, I attempted to park in the normal car park first. This was a mistake: we not only took up two end to end spots but the entire access road behind as well! There was nothing for it but to park in a HGV spot. We pulled alongside a lorry and I was surprised to see that we were the same length (although he was much taller and wider). We had our first lunch in the van and pressed on straight to Birchwood Tourist Park in Wareham Forest.

So what’s the big idea?
Back in June, whilst on honeymoon, I had ‘a moment of clarity’ thinking: what am I doing every day? Going to work to pay the mortgage and bills with hardly anytime to enjoy life and spend quality time with the family. It just wasn’t enough and I’m too young to get stuck in a rut so early. So I had the mad idea of selling all our worldly possessions, buying a caravan and travelling Europe for a year or two, home-educating the kids as we go.

Ali’s used to my mad moments so nodded in the right places and treated it as something that would soon pass. But it didn’t and over the next few days I had more and more ideas and constantly brought the subject up, after only a couple of weeks and a particularly bad day at work for Ali: we were on!

So the house went on the market and I began buying caravan magazines to research which models would suit us best. We spent the next few weekends driving around most of the South visiting caravan showrooms, weighing up the various pros and cons of each model and refining our shortlist. During this time I researched suitable cars to pull our intended 4 wheeled behemoth and we spent another weekend test driving the following automatic diesel 4x4’s: 3.0 & 5.0 VW Tauareg, Mercedes ML320 CDi, 3.0 Range Rover (full size) and 2.7 Land Rover Discovery 3, nothing else was really heavy enough to pull our intended 1700kg caravan (following the 85% rule).

In the end we bought a new 2006 model Avondale Argente 650-6 caravan as it made 4 bunks at the rear in a room that we could close off at the end of the day so we could relax with a glass of wine. The caravan’s layout puts the bathroom between us and the kids and a wooden door separating it from the kitchen and lounge area. This means the larger of the little tykes can get up in the middle of the night and find the loo without disturbing us.

We imported a silver left hand drive 2005 Land Rover Discovery 3 SE from Germany so we could spend all that continental driving time with a suitably oriented vehicle. As we are financing the entire trip from the equity in our house the mortgage reserve took a bit of a pounding at this stage!

About Us
Hello, we are the Launder family from Dorset but originally hailing from the west country (which explains our funny accents). We are Jon, Ali, Max (6), Cadan (4) and Jory (3).

Jon works for Barclays Africa as a technical infrastructure manager (IT position) generally running from one project to the next spending the banks money on hardware and proposing solutions to the latest ‘must fix’ problem.

Ali works as a business consultant (oh no! another IT position) for RIAS, an insurance firm specialising in the over 50’s. She runs about from one project to the next providing business and software solutions to her firm’s problems.

Max has just started year 1, he’s a high-energy child who needs constant entertaining and keeping away from food additives / colourings if you know what’s best for you. Max has a slight hearing problem and is unable to hear high-pitched tones (like his own voice which explains the extremely LOUD volume level!), this means a lot of repetition for those around him and makes it difficult for him to quickly assimilate and use information. Max’s favourite pastimes are running, shouting and eating.

Cadan has just started reception at the same school as Max. He is a relatively quiet and reserved child who knows his own mind and likes to do his own thing (such as reading books). Cadan doesn’t tend to ‘join in’ (much to Max’s annoyance) and operates on a completely different body clock from the rest of the family (inherited from his Granddad), liking to play (sometimes quietly) in his room till relatively late whilst his brothers are fast asleep. Cadan needs an hour or so to warm up in the morning and would happily lie in till lunch (early teenager alert!).

Jory, the youngest, is a carbon copy of his dad (mini me) and has a mix of his brother’s personality traits: Max’s volume and involvement, Cadan’s book interest. Jory’s a chatterbox and likes to fill every silence with constant mumblings. Jory goes to Montessori and has a fascination with clothing labels and stuffed ‘horseys’.