It seems that we’ve been writing a lot recently about how we’re preparing for our trip around Europe, lamenting about when it’s going to start, but not really focusing on why we’re doing it. It’s a question that we’ve been pondering on; especially when things haven’t been going according to plan.

You get to that stage in your late twenties where you’ve just got married, you’ve got a stable job and a bit of a financial cushion and you’re ready for the next logical step in life…leaving your job, buying a 23 year old motorhome with 10 previous owners and a bit of a damp problem and travelling around Europe in it for a year with no fixed destination. There we go – all explained!

Well, actually, no. I’m not sure that there was a single point where the idea came from to be honest. Kiri had a dream of going backpacking around Europe and Africa once she’d finished her degree and I bought into that, suggesting that it might be cheaper to do it in a motorhome. At this stage of inception, the trip was about adventure and the unknown. At this stage, excitement rating was 10 and anxiety rating was 0.

Soon after these discussions, we got engaged and thoughts turned towards the wedding day. All our creative energy was channelled towards KISTfest and we ditched the idea of departing from the wedding day in our motorhome. I was beginning to get into logistics mode and thought that this might be a little complicated to orchestrate alongside a wedding. We decided upon a “minimoon” after the wedding, with the trip being our belated honeymoon… and it would just be Europe, not Africa too. Excitement rating 9 and anxiety rating 2.

The first few months of married life were full of what the first few months of married life should be… designing a website together. Actually, that only formed a small part of our lives. We had decided to stay in London for another year after the wedding to get used to being married before we were confined to a small space together for another year. There was the question of a van though… and they were more expensive than we’d thought they might be. Was this trip really going to be a good way of spending our money? I procrastinated until the New Year with the choosing of one. Excitement rating 6 and anxiety rating 4.

With the support of a friend, we bought Bertha in March. We started praying about the trip (probably should have started praying earlier). I mean we have always said that we want to do what God wants us to do in life… did He want us to do this? Was this trip just going to be a bit of a jolly for us? Should this trip be a holiday, or something more? We started to get in contact with a variety of projects around Europe ranging from retreat centres to media organisations to a creative arts and prayer centre; we could use this trip as an opportunity to learn about how different cultures approach the concept of community. The aim would be to immerse ourselves within the different cultures, offering our skills and creativity where they can be used, but also taking time to listen and learn. Excitement rating 7 and anxiety rating 3.

As we left London in August, we shared our vision for the trip at our church in Kennington. After the service, someone who we had never met before came and shared something with Kiri that encouraged us that this trip is part of God’s plan for our future. This lady was just visiting church and she said that as she was praying for us, she felt strongly that God wanted to use us on this trip to change lives. That helped to reduce the anxiety. Well, anxiety about whether God wanted us to do this trip, but for me (I think it just encouraged Kiri) that put a little added pressure on the trip. Excitement rating 9 and anxiety rating 3.

So here we are now, almost 2 months after leaving London, but yet to leave the UK. There have been so many ups and downs in excitement and anxiety levels in the last few weeks that it would be impossible to document. There’s the fear of the unknown, the fear of stuff going wrong with Bertha, the fear that this is the wrong decision (yes, even though we’ve had the words of encouragement, I still have doubts), the fear of what will happen when we return. But to counter all of these fears, there’s the excitement of new experiences, of awesome people that we’ll meet in the travels, of the things that we’ll learn about ourselves and the world around us that will equip us for whatever God calls us to next. And actually, we shouldn’t be afraid, because we know that God is with us.

Why are we doing this trip? Because it’s right.

We’re so nearly there… yet sometimes it seems like we’re so far away from leaving. It seems to be that we take one step backwards for every forward step that we take. Our wins in the last week have been:

• We’ve got the cab curtain made, lined with thermal stuff, with velcro around the edges to keep the cold cab air out of the living area when we’re parked up
• The solar panel on the roof has now had all of its screws sealed with sikaflex and a bead of sealant around the front edges
• The bathroom has been given a deep clean, been resealed (silicon is so much nicer to work with than sikaflex!!!) and has a new removable floor over the shower tray
• New 12V charging points have been fitted in the habitation area and also in the dashboard (the previous charger in the dashboard was conveniently hit every time you changed into 3rd gear!)
• We’ve had a gas safety check and Bertha has been given a clean bill of health… we just need a quick re-test once we’ve got the water heater back in and the gas heater flue on
• The carpet in the living area has been ripped off to allow for vinyl to be laid in the next week

On top of these wins, we’ve had a couple of transformations. Firstly, we’ve finally got around to getting out the soldering iron and replacing all of the fluorescent tube lighting with LEDs, which will use much less battery juice. We’d already put a couple of strips of LED lights on the underside of the cupboards for “mood” lighting, but for the main lights, LEDs give a much warmer glow and look prettier behind the diffusers.

Our second transformation was of the oven space. We don’t really use an oven much in life and it was a bit weighty, so we decided we could better use that space for storage. After removing the oven, we built a little shelf in the middle of the void, then “up-cycled” an old blackboard to form the new door. Now we just have to decide what we can use as a handle…

So everything’s hunky dory then? Well… not quite. The things that have gone wrong this week have been:

• When we went to test the laptop charger in the newly-wired 12V socket, all of the lights went out. Turned out we’d got a 5amp fuse on that circuit and the laptop charger was trying to draw 5.7amps. The fuse box is a little inaccessible, but after a bit of work we’ve now replaced the fuse with a 10amp. At least we know the fuse box is working…!
• We ordered a 55mm flue for the gas heater, as that’s what the diameter of the old exhaust flue was. Turns out that when you’ve got a stainless steel flue rather than an aluminium flue, it’s not quite so flexible at stretching over the flanges, so that’s now gone on eBay… also marketed as a musical instrument and we’ve ordered a 60mm flue. Further delays!
• Despite being soldered by 3 different people and having a lot of attention in the last few months, it looks like we will have to say farewell to our Paloma water heater… we had such faith in it too. The gas engineer has diagnosed a faulty diaphragm and has suggested it would be cheaper to buy a new/reconditioned heater than have him fix the old one.
• As we pulled up the carpet, we discovered to our horror that the floor underneath it was wet. It wasn’t coming from outside, so we started investigating the water pipes. We thought it might be the sink waste pipe to start with, as that was quite brittle… we ended up having to reseal that when it cracked a bit more. However, we finally diagnosed a loose jubilee clip on the bottom of the hot tap. Squeezing in behind a fridge and working in a confined space is my idea of fun luckily and soon there was water no more (see views from outside and inside below!).

The list of things to do is getting ever shorter and the end is very much in sight. The remaining big jobs are getting the vinyl down and a new water heater fixed in, but I’m sure there will be a few more setbacks before we depart!

We fear that we may have given the wrong impression on this blog about our trip; it’s not all about Bertha. Yes, our world has been quite van-centric as we’re depending on her to carry us several tens of thousands of miles (that sounds scary to put it like that!), but there’s been plenty of other stuff going on behind the scenes that we’ve had to think about and work on before we leave. It’s almost quite good that she’s been with the mechanics for over 3 weeks in total in the last month and a half, as it’s given us time to focus on this stuff.

• Insurance – as we’re travelling for a year, we’ve got to think about not only vehicle insurance for the motorhome, but travel insurance and cover for any other equipment that we’re taking that’s not covered by travel insurance. All of them have to cover us for long periods at a time and in Europe, so we’ve gone for Safeguard for the vehicle insurance, have yet to decide on travel insurance provider and are using Photoguard for our camera.
• Breakdown cover – with a 23 year old motorhome, it’s inevitable that something mechanical is going to fail at some point, so this is essential. ADAC is recommended highly by a lot of European motorhomers, but we were nervous about the language barrier (they’re a German company), so instead went with Britannia Rescue who cover 180 days at a time in Europe.
• Campsite discounts – although we intend to “wild camp” a lot of the time by the side of the road and in car parks, we will need to use campsites for their utilities, but also in countries which don’t allow wild camping. Most campsites require identification to be kept at reception and in order to avoid having to let our passports out of our control, we’ve bought a Camping Card International, which not only can be used as ID, but also to give discounts and third party liability insurance. With the addition of an ACSI card for discounts at other campsites, hopefully we won’t have to fork out too much when we’re not wild camping
• Vehicle tax – this expires whilst we’re away. We really should have bought just 6 months, then bought another 12 when we return to the UK in March, but I goofed. Instead, we’re going to have to buy a further 12 months when we return in March, then fill in a V14 form and get a refund on the remaining months we have left on our current tax disc. We’ve also discovered that the 25 year old vehicle tax exemption doesn’t apply any more, so when Bertha hits 25 in February 2015, we (or the next owners) will still have to pay tax.
• MOT – this also expires whilst we’re away, but we tried to have the MOT as late as possible before we left. We’ve checked, and as long as we have one booked for as soon as we get back to UK and we drive straight there from the ferry, we’re covered.
• Navigation – as we travel round, we don’t want to rely on just a sat nav, so we’ve purchased a Philip’s Multiscale Europe 2013 road atlas which should help too. We have loaded lots of POIs (points of interest) onto the sat nav though to help us find Lidl (they are friendly towards motorhomes), McDonalds (they have free wifi!) and camping spots
• Health – after accompanying my brother to hospital when we were in Belgium, we both know the importance of having an EHIC each – it’s also been recommended by the local doctor’s surgery that we have the tick-borne encephalitis innoculation. It costs quite a bit, but you can’t really put a price on health
• Money abroad – we don’t want to be stung by high card charges when travelling and we don’t really want to open a bank account in every country. After quite a bit of research, we decided upon the Halifax clarity card which has no fees for use abroad, including withdrawing cash. The only fee you pay is interest on cash withdrawals, but we intend to transfer money across to pay it off within a day or two of withdrawing money from a machine, thereby minimising the interest.
• Communications – this has already been covered in a blog post about connectivity – the only thing to add is that we’re backing up all of our important documents on “the cloud”, within encrypted volumes to keep them nice and safe. Oh, and we’ve installed Prey on our laptop so that if it does get stolen, we can track it!

So that’s been quite a lot to think about, as well as making sure we’ve got the correct lightweight cooking equipment, clothing and entertainment stuff (paints, games, radio etc – we’re not taking a TV).

Oh, and another thing that we’ve been able to get done in this time is our wedding video, including the time lapse that we shot at our own wedding:

Sadly, it’s probably more accurate to say “a short breakdown time”! After our trip to Portsmouth last week, Bertha was a little low on fuel, so we did what any reasonable people would do and took her to a petrol station. It became evident once she’d been filled up though that she wasn’t happy, as a trickle of petrol emerged from her underside. After a cautious drive to our friendly mechanic, it was confirmed that she needs a new fuel tank. Will we ever leave the country? As the mechanic put it, “I’m not a betting man, but…” before he trailed off into silence.

So whilst we wait for the new fuel tank to arrive at the garage, we’re unable to get on with the remaining carpentry work inside her; making a cupboard in place of the oven, adding shelves to the wardrobe etc. So it’s back to Julie Andrews’ recommendation of a needle pulling thread. Yes, that is an adjustable wrench; I find it to be a necessary accessory when sewing.

In the “down time” without Bertha we’ve now completed all of the re-upholstery of the cushions and have made all of the new curtains (re-using the lining, header tape and hooks from the old curtains). We only have the cab curtain left to do, which we can’t do much about until we get Bertha back.

Does that mean we’re just lazing about now? To a certain degree we’ve taken our foot off the accelerator pedal a little (but not enough to stall completely…our clutch control is hopefully good enough…although mine wasn’t great as I reversed up the hill out of the welder’s drive…there might have been a little smoke…) but there’s still plenty of other planning to do – getting this website ready to receive our daily logs, making sure all paperwork is in good order and bargain-hunting to make sure we’ve got all we need in the van to be legally compliant and comfortable in all countries.

We’re not quite sure when we’ll get Bertha back, but it will be all hands to the brand new pump as soon as we do!

A week on from the last post, and what a week it’s been. We have come on in leaps and bounds (a bit like Tigger), then have become quite disheartened about things (a bit like Eeyore), but in general we think we’re just muddling through (a bit like Pooh).

This week we spent a few days down in Portsmouth where a friend with an enormous toolkit and knowhow to match helped us out, well, enormously. It’s probably easiest to break down the journey of the last week into categories:

Water

The good news is that the rear of the motorhome is now completely watertight. The bad news is that the front wasn’t. On Thursday night I woke up to find my crotch was wet. For the first time in my life I hoped that I had wet myself, but no, the vent above our bed was leaking. Kiri nimbly jumped on the roof (in the morning) and sealed it though with Sikaflex, so we’re all good.

Our water pump turned out to be dead, but with a bit of online bargain hunting and a price-match guarantee we got a good deal on a new one (see below). It’s just a shame that the water heater had another leak that we hadn’t seen previously. To cut a very long story (involving 3 soldering devices and 3 people having a go at soldering) short, the leak is now fixed, but a control valve isn’t… something else for the todo list.

Electrics

Remember the loose wire in the zig unit? Turns out I had connected it back in the right place – the black wire denoting vehicle earth (or negative if the circuit was elsewhere). It was re-assuring to have someone with an electrical qualification confirming this though. Once he’d shown me how to use my multimeter, he left me measuring voltages happily whilst he replaced the electrical connector boxes (the previous ones were crumbling… turns out they were the cause of the previous issues), wired in our second leisure battery and fitted our solar panel regulator.

Once all of that was done, with a great team effort the solar panel was glued and screwed to the roof, with the wires passing through a marine gland to avoid water ingress. Since then I’ve added another couple of strips of LED lights, leaving just a few 12V cigarette lighter sockets for us to wire in as extra charging points.

Gas

We don’t want to be lugging gas canisters around the whole time as we travel, so we’ve gone for the Gaslow option; refillable gas canisters that can be refilled with LPG at petrol stations. It’s sold as a kit that you can install yourself, so, once again with a little lot of help from our friend, we got cracking; screwing together the connections and putting a filling point in the skirt of Bertha.

[Edit 14 February 2015: We’ve just found out that the installation of this Gaslow R67 kit does not meet regulations. Although we ordered a “normal” gas bottle to start with from Gaslow, for which a strap is an acceptable fitting, we were sent an R67 cylinder (because the normal bottle was out of stock), for which there are specific regulations. The new owners of Bertha have been informed. Thank you to the guys at TalbotOC.com for highlighting this issue.]

We’ve blanked off the oven as we’re removing it to give us more cupboard space, so the appliances we had to test were the heater, hob, grill, boiler and fridge. All of them lit straight away apart from the fridge, which we’ll have to read the instructions for. I mean, an appliance that cools things down with fire? Blows your mind! Talking of things blowing up, we’re getting a gas safe engineer to check the whole system, so that we can be safe… after all, gas safety week is next week!

Lessons learned

It’s impossible to do a review of a week without a standard consultancy “what went well” and “even better if” question. Well firstly, Kiri learned that bumpers aren’t to be stood on (at least we found out that the bumper connection was rusty at this stage). Secondly, we both learned of our fuel consumption… at 17 MPG it looks like we’ll be spending most of our money in this next year on petrol! And thirdly, snow chains can get in the way a little (don’t ask!).

We’d never really planned to totally re-upholster Bertha… it, kind of, just happened! The long seat covers were a little worn at the seams, so we realised we’d have to do something about that, then we noticed the seat covers at the rear of the van weren’t quite the same material. Might as well do all of the seat covers then. And if we’re doing the seats, the curtains have to match (obviously!), so we might as well re-do those as well.

Now neither of us have done much upholstery work before, although with all of the bunting that we did for KISTfest (over 1000 flags in the end), we’re pretty handy with a sewing machine. Our first challenge was finding some strong, hard-wearing, cheap material. Bargain bins and charity shops had yielded a few offcuts here and there which will add some colour, but we struck gold with the idea of buying dust sheets – 24 feet by 9 feet for just over £20 – bargainous! These would form the bulk of the seat covers, then we could just sew patches of the other offcuts on top.

It turns out that dust sheets aren’t necessarily uniform in size. Or colour. Or type of fabric. And they may have stains on them. Or footprints. We like a challenge though, so set to work cutting coloured patches, ironing them flat and sewing them onto the dust sheets, before sewing the dust sheets up to create box covers for the foam seats. It’s amazing the difference that a few cheap patches can make to an even cheaper bit of cotton! It’s also amazing what lengths some people go to in order to try out a cushion cover for size…

As a result of the dust sheet revelations (can’t say we can think of anywhere in Revelation that it mentions dust sheets though… sounds more like something you’d find in Leviticus), we decided to spend a little more on the curtains. The plan is to re-use the linings of the existing curtains, then just add the new (red) fabric to it. We did splash out on an extra £8 for thermal lining for the cab though – we’ll trap the cold air in there in the winter!

As we stand today (because the seats aren’t all ready yet!), the main side seat has been re-covered in full and the base of the rear seat has been done. (Note the old curtains just in view on the left of this picture)

Only 6 more box cushions to do (of different shapes and sizes) and then it’s curtains for us.