Joolz and Dave's EuroTrip 2019

[Guigsy]

For well over a year, my wife and I have been talking about quitting our jobs and spending a few months travelling around Europe in our 5.4m Ducato campervan. We're "sensible" (read: "boring"), it's not something that people like us do...

So we've handed in our notices and two weeks ago we got on the ferry to Bilbao. We're currently doing a loop of Spain. We went east straight along the Pyrenees to Figueres and the coast, and we've been heading south. Tomorrow we pass through Benidorm. We've got a rough plan to loop back up through the middle of Spain and get back to the northern coast in April.

After that, it depends on:
-Cash flow
-The political situation
-Whether Joolz and I are still putting up with each other in the 'crampervan'.

If everything goes well, we've joked about continuing on to France, Italy and beyond and maybe do Scandinavia before it gets too cold...

Anyway, we're blogging it here:
EndlessWeekend.co.uk

Say Hi if you see us...


Dave and Joolz
AKA Guigsy

 

[Jenowen]

Sounds like a great idea. Have fun. You won’t be cramped in your van providing the weather’s warm enough to be outside! Will look forward to reading your posts.

 

[suavecarve]

Hope you enjoy it but ........................slow down, plenty of time and you ll only keep going back to see the things you missed.

 

[tonka]

If you land in Benidorm, several funsters still around on the various sites. So post up where you are and maybe you can get to meet a few. We are on villasol till Saturday.

 

[Guigsy]

Sounds like a great idea. Have fun. You won’t be cramped in your van providing the weather’s warm enough to be outside! Will look forward to reading your posts.

The first few nights were in the hills around Burgos. We woke up with frost on the van. Thankfully I'd spent a couple of weekends filling the van's cavities with proper insulation before we left... and Joolz filled the inside with fleecy blankets. We were originally going to head to Madrid, but the cold made us change our plans and head for the coast. A few days later and I broke out the shorts!

We're trying to post every day, so keep a lookout.

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[Northernraider]

The first few nights were in the hills around Burgos. We woke up with frost on the van. Thankfully I'd spent a couple of weekends filling the van's cavities with proper insulation before we left... and Joolz filled the inside with fleecy blankets. We were originally going to head to Madrid, but the cold made us change our plans and head for the coast. A few days later and I broke out the shorts!

We're trying to post every day, so keep a lookout.

Enjoy

Its warm down here

 

[DBK]

Best of luck on the trip! However, if you want engagement with folks on here the best plan is to post on the forum rather than your blog though you can do both of course.

 

[Guigsy]

Best of luck on the trip! However, if you want engagement with folks on here the best plan is to post on the forum rather than your blog though you can do both of course.

Thanks for the tip. I'll be doing both!

Joolz always writes a scrapbook/diary for all the trips we do. I figured a blog would mean we can share it as our trip progresses. It does mean that and the end of the trip, I've somehow got to work out how to extract the blog pages so it survives beyond the life of the website though...

 

[DBK]

Thanks for the tip. I'll be doing both!

Joolz always writes a scrapbook/diary for all the trips we do. I figured a blog would mean we can share it as our trip progresses. It does mean that and the end of the trip, I've somehow got to work out how to extract the blog pages so it survives beyond the life of the website though...

What you write up on here can just be copied and then pasted into say a Word document. Doing it this way won't pick up the images but you will have those stored somewhere else of course. This is what I do.

If you are using Android make sure it backs up any images you transfer to your tablet or whatever you are using. You can get unlimited storage if you accept it only stores a reduced size of the image but for web use these smaller images will be fine. I pay £10 a month to Google and have 2Tb of storage and back up full sized originals to it but most folk probably don't want this.

I'm sure there are many ways to back up all photos on the SD card in your camera but what works for me, as my tablet doesn't have it's own SD card slot, is to use my phone, which does. With an OTG cable and a card reader I can copy all the photos from the camera card onto a card in the phone. This assumes you are using a camera with an SD card of course. If you are just using your phone as a camera then cloud storage as mentioned above will be fine.

 

[Guigsy]

Our tour continues. Wednesday we were in Calpe and climbed the impressive Peñón de Ifach which totally dominates the town:

View from the top:

Calpe was nice and chilled, a calm beach destination... then we moved the 30 minutes down the road to Benidorm. It's superficially quite similar with an even better beach, but it's a lot more busy.

I seem to be making a habit of climbing the biggest hill/rock...

More detail on the blog...
EndlessWeekend.co.uk

We've just driven the 400km to Granada. We're hoping to get in to the Alhambra Palace, but as we're winging the whole thing, we've not got tickets. Looks like I'll be queuing at the gates at sunrise tomorrow...

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[Guigsy]

We found out from the Alhambra ticket office that returned tickets get released on the website at midnight. I ended up setting an alarm for 11:50pm to wake myself up and madly press refresh. I managed to snag us a couple of general access tickets... phew!

We then took the insane bus ride down the hill to Granada centre. The arabic influence remains there too.

Next we move up into the Sierra Nevada mountains...

More detail on the blog:
EndlessWeekend.co.uk

 

[Guigsy]

From Granada, we ventured up the mountain to an excellent campsite overlooking a reservoir called Las Lomas. Definitely want to go back there again.

When we got up in the morning to lots of birds singing (makes a change from traffic noise at our city stops) we headed upwards towards the Sierra Nevada peaks where it's still ski season:

No skiing for us this time. Lots of motorhomes up there though. Next stop, Malaga.

More detail on the blog:
EndlessWeekend.co.uk

 

[Gaston aires]

If you can, find time for Provence, especially around the Luberon, (Peter Maille, Provence.)
Great area.
Enjoy your time.
Phil

 

[Northernraider]

When you get to Malaga I can reccomend torremolinos too lovely here just now.
Malaga centre is worth a visit as is the marina and dock area.

 

[Guigsy]

Another update...

We spent a few days along the Costa del Sol:

And yesterday we had some fun in the time warp that is Gibraltar.

Actually, mostly fun, except for the surprise monkey...

More detail on the blog:
EndlessWeekend.co.uk

That's as far south as we go. We're now leaving the sea and heading north.

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[Guigsy]

Updates:
We've been to Jerez, mainly to learn about sherry:

We then went to go and see the Kingdom of Dorne (Game of Thrones), also known as Seville:

More detail on the blog:
EndlessWeekend.co.uk

 

[Greenway]

I enjoy reading travel blogs but when I look at yours using my iPad the photos cover the words.

 

[Blue Knight]

Some fantatsic pics there guys - I'm pleased that you're having such a great time.

Keep the photos coming

 

[Guigsy]

I enjoy reading travel blogs but when I look at yours using my iPad the photos cover the words.

View attachment 292437

We're using Wordpress (a very common blogging platform), but the formatting template we're using is was an add-on. First, do iPads have a 'view as mobile' or 'view as desktop' option in the browser? Maybe that will fix it? Meanwhile, I'll see if I can change the formatting template without breaking the whole site!

 

[Greenway]

Thanks Dave, @Guigsy. I've worked it out now. Once I've opened you blog and selected an entry, a row of bars appear on the left of the address bar. I click on that and all is well.
Nice blog keep it coming. We have been to many of the places you have visited so it's a nice reminder.

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[Guigsy]

Travel log update:

We're pretty much in the middle of Spain in Córdoba. Even here, the area was dominated by Islamic culture for hundreds of years. The Córdoba Mezquita was one of the biggest mosques in the world, and a thousand years later, it's striped arches are still amazing:

We then went on to Consuegra, which is in the middle of the La Mancha plains. It's got the windmills that Don Quixote fought:

More detail on the blog:
EndlessWeekend.co.uk

We're still stomping north... got a ferry with our name on it in about a week...

 

[Guigsy]

Weekend update:

We stopped by Toledo, which apparently is famous for marzipan (Joolz got carried away). It also has a very old synagogue:

Several of our friends said to not bother with Madrid. After a visit, we quite liked it, but it's not particularly Spanish...

After that we headed to the mountains to the Valley of the Fallen. This massive monument was built by the fascist dictator Franco. It's scale is so hard to grasp from the pictures.

We podded north, but took the old cattle trading route over the mountains. We found the monument to the MotoGP motorcycle racer Angel Nieto:

More detail on the blog:
EndlessWeekend.co.uk

 

[Blue Knight]

It looks as if you're both having a fab time

Great pics BTW

 

[Guigsy]

Update, Part Deux has begun!

We spent a couple of (very cold weeks) in Blighty. I made some comfort upgrades to the van and then we did a family weekend away in Wales at Shell Island:

We headed back to The Continent. Joolz very much did not want to take a ferry this time, so we tried the Eurotunnel for the first time. That was nearly three weeks ago now.

The plan this time is to head down to Italy. We've got a rough route taking us through France, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Italy.

First stop was to see the beaches at Dunkirk and the war memorials in Ypres. We then went in to Bruges where Joolz discovered that she actually likes beer! My stash may never be safe again!

We hopped into Germany via the Eifel National Park:

On to Cologne where we mostly did chocolate and (I did) kolsch beer:

We then went via the Nurburgring to Koblenz:

We then spent a couple of days in Luxembourg where we saw the American WW2 cemetery and compared it to the German cemetery just down the road:

We popped back into France to visit Strasbourg for a few days:

Then it was back into Germany to see Baden-Baden, which I'd previously visited and I knew Joolz would like (and I enjoyed a beer garden):

The plan after that was to spend a few days in the Black Forrest, but the weather hasn't been great:

Now we're heading to Switzerland...

Loads more detail on the blog:
EndlessWeekend.co.uk