Home again, what a year!

Well, we arrived home early evening to find that Charlie had been a great caretaker.  He made us a wonderful meal and we chilled out with a beer and a couple of glasses of wine and some Rockband.  Tomorrow and real life starts in earnest again.

Motorhome life by the numbers might be interesting for anyone thinking of doing the same.  We were not frugal but we also were not afraid to splash out for special days.  

We spent €20K in our year away  A simple breakdown is diesel was €2.5K, groceries: €5K, site fees: €3.5K, road tolls: €1K, days out €4K, meals out €3K, LPG and Misc stuff: €1K.  That doesn’t include road fund license, insurance, storage fees for when the MS2 is in her stable and other continued household expenses back home.  

Our biggest expense was clearly nosh.  We always ate well and bought local produce wherever we could.  We ate locally when we were out and about during the day (rather than packed lunches from MS2), but mostly in the Mothership in the evenings. We definitely could have reduced this a lot – perhaps by eating out less, perhaps by having meat less often or buying less local produce in favour of supermarkets. Groceries also includes drinks and we do like a tipple *hic*.  Luckily we don’t have a breakdown of liquid refreshments.

Money summary: We could certainly have done this trip much cheaper – we could have used aires more often.  We could have saved a lot in both Rome and Lisbon by using cheaper camp sites (nearly €1000 just for those six weeks of camp site fees).  If you do the same, you may be in a smaller or lower van with much better fuel economy. We could have saved a lot on groceries. But we actually budgeted more that €20K, so we are pretty chuffed to have come home not *quite* skint!

Diesel: well, it is what it is.  MS2 is heavy and tall. We get roughly 25mpg (in weird quirky British units) or 8.8km/l in SI units. We knew what were in for as far as diesel was concerned and although 25mpg sounds bad, it’s better than either our Defender or Saab so it’s a win for us.  It’s not too much worse than MS1 which was half the weight.

Environment: There is not really any way around this.  That 1700 litres of diesel plus 160 litres of LPG have created nearly 5 tons of CO2 .  Ouch. Using online calculators, this is the same as two return trips (each) to Cyprus or both of us taking a return flight to Florida.  So it’s not really as bad as it sounds. We may offset that once we are working again!

As we type this, the motorhome is slowly being emptied, cleaned and going back to the compound for a little while.  There are a few things to fix too. Minor problems and issues to fix. We are grabbing the Saab and getting the Defender out of mothballs.  Job Serve alerts have been set up and various household tasks are being scheduled.

We’ll continue to update the blog.  You may see some weird posts for old events turning up: primarily we want the blog to be useful to us as a reminder of what we did, so we have decided to put some of our old trips on here: it is a great searching tool for those times when we argue about whether that amazing walled town in the Sierra Nevadas was Namur or Samur!

We did this as a 50th birthday present to each other.  Our advice to anyone else is ‘jump in, don’t wait until you are too old/weak/unwell to enjoy it’.  A (nearly) grey gap year is a great experience. Brexit brings uncertainty for UK citizens doing long term trips abroad.  Our advice is ‘don’t let it stop you’. There will always be many reasons not to do it. Don’t let language be a barrier: we have apps on the phone to help us and pretty much everywhere we could get by.  Most countries speak better English than we do.

But stick to the UK if you feel more comfortable. There are many wonderful things to do and see and you could fill up a lifetime without ever leaving the UK. Equally, don’t feel tethered to Western Europe, many grey gappers get to Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey and beyond.  And as for us? We are already thinking about ‘what next?’ For every place we visited on the ‘things to do’ list that we ticked off, there are two places that we didn’t get to see. As we follow other gapper and van-life bloggers, we are constantly adding new places to the list for lap two.  Of the EU27 we visited only a few countries. Between Holidays and longer tours we have so much we still want to do and see!

Bon Voyage!

Selina and Toby 2019