The Launder's big adventure

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!