I’m always interested in what other people are doing in their motorhomes, so I recently put ‘motorhome adventures Europe’ into the search box at youtube.

What struck me immediately was the images of happy smiling couples looking like they had just won the lottery, women with perfect makeup, lots of glasses of wine and beer, idyllic surroundings.

Some videos boast about distances, for example 2,500 miles in 6 days – I think there is some kind of lunacy about when people are driving so many miles. Our typical average speed is around 40 mph on motorway standard roads, so 400 miles is around 10 hours of driving. Where is the pleasure in that?

1,200 miles in 4 days;  yes, of course you can drive huge distances, but why? Are you out to prove something? Where is the pleasure sitting behind the wheel or in the passenger seat hour after hour? 

We aim to drive less than 200 km a day, a typical day starts with coffee around 7 am, a leisurely breakfast finishes around 9am then coffee takes us to around 10:30 when we start to think about where will be staying tonight. We would aim to be on the road after servicing the Hymer (empty cassette and grey water, top up fresh water) by late morning. We never book our overnight stays ahead of time, we just turn up, if the aire etc is full we move on. On a few occasions that has been inconvenient because we had to move on, but we’re flexible and can handle that. Our aim is to arrive at the overnight stop mid to late afternoon because that’s when there will be the most available places. Some of our best moves have been the shortest, from one wine producer to the next just along the road, or the next village.

Maybe we are getting too blasé altogether, this kind of loose itinerary doesn’t suit everyone, many people need their overnight stops planned in advance; our travel is unpredictable, we book an outward journey but no return, like our last trek to Spain and France. It was planned to the extent that we had our ferry booked from Plymouth to Santander, and a vague idea of revisiting Granada and Cordoba plus some Roman remains but that’s as far as it went. We didn’t have anywhere planned for our first night in Spain, that was decided after we had filled up with cheap Spanish diesel and done our first supermarket shop.

The reality of the trip was that temperatures were so high that we abandoned our initial ideas and drove into the mountains to wait out the weather. When temperatures remained high we opted to drive through France heading for Calais and the tunnel; but we didn’t book the tunnel until 24 hours before our departure.

My message is stay flexible, don’t try to pack too much into each day, relax and enjoy your surroundings, watch the other people and be amazed at the things they do! I’ll add a post about the strange things people do soon.