As alluded to in a previous blog post, we see this trip as a great opportunity to do cool and funky things with data – much along the lines of “Information is Beautiful”, although probably not executed quite as well. We have yet to decide exactly what data we’ll gather and what art projects we’ll take on, however GPS is a kind of obvious starting point. What follows is a bit of a GPS geek indulgence.

Even before we begin to think about what we might do with any GPS data that we generate, we had to decide how we would gather it. Now if power wasn’t an issue, we’d be laughing. We’re not laughing (but we are smiling – it’s ok – we’re happy). Smartphones and GPS dongles that plug into your computer are great, but they’re quite power hungry, and we only have limited battery power. One option was to purchase a Raspberry Pi, add a GPS dongle to it and write some capture software, but that would take time.

There are loads of GPS trackers on the market… but most of them want a SIM card in them so that you can remotely locate the tracker. Now that would be pretty cool, but with roaming mobile charges that wouldn’t be cheap. What we needed was something with a long battery life whose only function was to log co-ordinates, altitude and time every 5 seconds, which we could then download at a later date. Enter Ivor (our i-gotu GT600):

So we’ve got the device, which records all we want it to, but also has a great battery life which is extended further by a motion detector which puts it on standby if it’s not moving. Good stuff! Only one issue; we don’t use Windows (well, actually I do have Windows on my Ubuntu laptop, but only because the TomTom software has no Ubuntu alternatives and won’t work on the age Mac we have). This means we can’t use the @Trip software as a matter of course. No worries – thanks to igotu2gpx, we’re cooking on gas (more on the subject of cooking with gas later!) and can transfer our co-ordinates onto the computer and into standard gpx format. The only thing that we can’t do with this is remove the data from the GPS device itself… so for that we’ll be forced to boot into Windows.

Once the data is in gpx format, we’ve been using GPSPrune to do a little bit of processing; things like removing duplicate points, changing the time offset and extracting a few stats. It’s quite cool:

So that’s all well and good, but we want to do something a bit more funky with this GPS data that we’re gathering. We’re going to have absolutely shed loads of it, spreading across most of Europe and we don’t want it to go to waste. Well… we’ll upload it to openstreetmap obviously, but there’s got to be something exciting and creative that we can do with it all. We’ve had a little bit of a play with gpxanim which animates a gpx track and that’s more along the lines of what we’re thinking maybe.

In the interests of getting more ideas, we thought we’d open it up to you and share our raw gpx data as we go round. We know lots of people who are creative and maybe a little bit geeky (in a good way), so if you would like our data, just let us know and it’s yours!

Maybe someone will come up with something as funky as one of Bruno Imbrizi’s experiments…?

I’m not sure whether the title should be a reference to the wonderful weather we’ve had since leaving our jobs, or a reference to all of the things that keep on going wrong with Bertha as we try to fix her up (it pours)! At least one helps the other be more manageable.

Bertha has passed her MOT! Get in! Harry, the friendly mechanic, only had to replace the rear brake assemblies and fit new batteries and she sailed through her MOT. We have to thank Sean for helping us choose a van that is so good mechanically… which segways nicely into the work we’ve been doing on her since we got her back on Monday.

The main job is still the damp issue in the rear corner, requiring us to rip out gently remove the rotten battens and plywood to replace it with sound stuff. We planned to do this on Thursday (because we had good friends staying with us at the beginning of the week) – starting by taking out the rear window so we could get access to the rotten wood. Which night did it rain? Wednesday… continuing into Thursday morning… not really the weather for removing windows. We had to therefore shuffle things around a bit and do that today. We ripped out carefully extracted the window, then Kiri announced that she was “ready to demolish”.

At close of play today we have successfully removed (and replaced, including re-sealing with sikaflex (not bathroom sealant, which we suspect may be partially to blame for our damp issues)) the rear window. We’ve also removed many, many rotten bits of wood that might have happened to be structural and replaced them with fresh, treated timber and we’ve removed all of the plywood that we’re going to remove.

Now onto the things that seem to be going wrong. When we got the van back, I was keen to fix the freeze split in the water heater, so got out my soldering iron, did my stuff, then put some plumber’s putty on it just to make sure. However, when I reinstalled it and turned on the water, the water pump wasn’t working. Sad times.

A quick check of the leisure battery showed that there was a “burnt bit on a white plastic thingy” (sorry for the technical language), which didn’t seem to be healthy. We then undid the zig unit (no idea what “zig” means, but it’s the electrical control unit), found a loose black wire in there, re-wired it to a random other black wire, which made the lights on the front of the zig unit work (where they hadn’t before), but made the lights randomly turn off when you turned another light on… before quickly unwiring it did absolutely nothing and thought we would leave it to someone who knows about electrics. A quick phone call to the heroic Harry confirmed that the inline fuse holder (white plastic burnt thingy) had been like that before the new leisure battery was installed. So, I went to unscrew the fuse holder, managed to smash the glass and destroy the 15amp fuse, which then stopped any of the electrics from working from the leisure battery… meaning that the wpbt (white plastic burnt thingy) was probably a legacy problem. In any case, we have another one on order, as well as a multimeter so we can try to properly diagnose things.

The other minor distraction involved a gas canister. Mum, don’t panic – we’re fine and we’re going to get the gas checked out by a professional before we use it. We’re replacing our gas system with Gaslow – refillable LPG tanks, so to prepare for that I removed the old Calor gas tank from the gas locker. This revealed the flue and duct from the gas heater. That was vaguely disconnected and bodged together with gaffer tape. Another thing to add to the to-do list.

As least curtains and re-upholstery shouldn’t be too complicated…

Doing web design, whilst chasing cows out of your front garden… you don’t see that happening in London! Living in the countryside whilst we do the last few things before our trip is taking a little bit of adjusting to, but it’s great!

It’s now been just over a week since we left London and we had hoped to have made good progress with Bertha, our four-wheeled friend, by this stage. However, the last time we checked up on her, she looked like this (well, her rear axle did):

Bertha is in safe hands though, with a friendly mechanic, undergoing a service before her MOT. The signs are all fairly positive, as the only things which require attention are a minor issue with the rear brakes and a leisure battery which is leaking vaguely explosive hydrogen. Thank goodness we hadn’t got round to testing the gas yet! So with these things being fixed (delayed a little by a wait for parts), we’ve been focussing on the non-van-related things to do for our trip, interspersed with a few other lovely activities.

The main thing that we’ve been focussing on is this site; specifically the KIST 2EU section. We’ve added an FAQs page (please ask us more questions to go on it!) and we’re slowly working through the creation of our country guides. They’re not going to rival Lonely Planet, but they should at least hold all of the pertinent information that we’ll need in one place. There’s still work to be done on an infographics page; something that has to be done considering my background in data analysis and Kiri’s graphic design skills. We also still need to work out exactly how we’re going to display a map of our route as we go along – we’ll write a separate blog post shortly about our testing of a GPS device.

There have also been a few purchases that we’ve been making; the most significant of which is fabric for re-upholstering the seats in the living area and making new curtains. After a lot of research (including visiting this website which has a great quote of “We offer a discount to OAPs on a Wednesday”), we decided that we’ll use cotton dust sheets as the main fabric (£10.99 for a 12′ by 9′ sheet!), then sew patches of interesting material onto them to brighten it all up. I also spent a couple of hours servicing and setting up our folding bikes so the chain doesn’t fall off when you change gear!

With all of this busyness, our Lightbulb Head work has taken a bit of a back seat, however it was great to see Pig and Porter in action at the Ashburnham Flower show and taste their wares. Seriously, with beer and food that tasty, which sells itself, they don’t really need the website for marketing, but we’re spending a bit of time working with them whilst we’re in the area.

We have also attempted to do a countryside time lapse video to rival the one we did in London before we left (Oval crossroads). On our first day here, Norman the local farmer was mowing a field, so we set up a camera expectantly… It turns out that there’s a slower pace of life outside London (plenty of tea breaks in the mowing!), so the resulting time lapse doesn’t particularly work on its own. We’ll combine it into another bit of film work at some stage though.

As for the “lovely activities”, these have included a barbecue followed by watching shooting stars, a visit to play pirate golf in Hastings and attending the local MI (men’s institute) meeting. We could get used to village life!

We’re leaving London tomorrow and we’re not coming back…well, actually, we are coming back in 2 weeks for a wedding, but then we’re not coming back! Yes, after weeks and months of planning, we’re finally leaving London to embark on upgrading Bertha (our motorhome) before we set off in her around Europe. These last few weeks in London have been pretty full on – here’s a flavour of what we’ve been up to.

Aside from both going through the rigmarole of leaving our jobs (thank you for the moderately priced bottle of wine!), we’ve had the interesting task of deciding where to leave our belongings whilst we’re travelling. Our family have been very kind and have given us the use of a loft, so in early July we hired a van and drove most of our things to Leicester. Now we don’t want Bertha to feel inadequate in any way, but the hire van was less than a year old, with only 1000 miles on the clock and incredible air conditioning on the first hot weekend of the year. Bliss. So that’s most of our belongings dealt with.

For months I’ve been wanting to do a time lapse from the top of St. Mark’s church overlooking the crossroads at Oval tube station and a couple of weeks ago we finally got round to it. There’s a blog post about it on our business website (lightbulbhead.co.uk) if you’re interested in the back story, but here’s the video:

We’ve also been looking after the design and content of the St. Mark’s website for the last couple of years and we wanted to leave it in a state where we were happy with it visually, but we could hand over the management of content to someone in the church office. Again, there’s a blog post about it at lightbulbhead.co.uk covering some of the technical details. If you want to go straight to the website, it’s stmarkskennington.org.

We’re terrible at goodbyes, but we’ve enjoyed spending some final fleeting moments with our London friends in the last few days in various locations; a garden, a pub, another pub and today at church. It’s now just time for the packing of the last few things in the flat and a quick wipe of surfaces on top of the deep clean we’ve done in the last week. I think we’ll leave our mouse traps for the next tenants…they’ll need them!

The adventure starts here!

As the days tick down before we head off into the sunset mainland Europe in Bertha, so the jobs are slowly being ticked off too. The job for today? Sort out how we’re going to stay connected to our friends and family back in the UK. Now I say that it was a job for today – this is actually something that we’ve been musing for several months as we also have been considering how much we want to be connected too. We don’t want to take much electronic kit in the van as that would equate to more stuff for people to steal, but also more stuff for our batteries to be drained by.

Initially we baulked at the idea of shelling out money for keeping connected when we’re travelling in Bertha, but then we examined what we currently pay in the UK for our telephone and internet per year, and it put things into perspective:

• Landline rental: £14 per month
• Broadband: £6 per month
• Kiri’s mobile contract: £8 per month
• Steve’s mobile contract: £13 per month

That comes out at £492 per year…plus we had a connection fee for the broadband, which covered the router as well.

So, we’ve settled on 4 methods for keeping connected in Bertha, all neatly facilitated by Motorhome WiFi (we’ve also used Adam + Sophie’s personal site “Europe By Camper” for research on other stuff related to our trip). So, what are the four methods?

1. Open wi-fi – with a booster system, we’ll be able to connect a laptop to any open wi-fi hotspots within a larger range than if we just used the laptop’s own wireless antenna. This means at campsites we’ll be able to sit in the comfort of our own van and get online, or sit in a McDonalds car park in the van. We’ll try to use this as the main source of getting online as after the initial cost of the equipment, it’s free! Cost: £160 then free!
2. European 3G PAYG SIM – we realise that we won’t always find an open wi-fi hotspot to use, so if we’re desperate to get online, we’ll do so using a roaming 3G SIM. However…neither of us will be taking smartphones, so we’ll be using a mi-fi device that acts as a wireless hotspot so that we can use a laptop with it. The other option was a 3G dongle, but we’ve found it’s quite a hassle to get 3G dongles to work nicely with Ubuntu. We won’t be using it every day, so it’s great that it’s pay as you go. On the days that we use data, we’ll also get 50 SMS messages free, so that’s when we’ll reply to texts! Cost: £30 then €3 per day that we use it for 50 Mb Data, 50 SMS and 50 minutes
3. European 2G PAYG SIM – OK, technically this is also a 3G SIM, but it has the bonus of providing free incoming calls when in some countries in Europe, with the UK caller paying the price of a UK call too. Again, this is pay as you go, so we won’t be charged when we don’t use it. To be honest, we’ll most likely use this for receiving phone calls rather than calling out. Cost: £5 then free(ish)
4. Letters – yep, that’s right, we’re going to use pen and paper to write letters. We both love receiving letters in the post – there’s something so much more special about it than receiving an email and as we’ll have more time in the evenings without worrying about being online, we should hopefully have time to sit and write to people. Cost: price of a stamp

To be honest, all of this weighing up has made us realise that actually we take for granted the 24×7 connected world that we live in at the moment. Just 10 years ago I didn’t have a constantly-on broadband connection and 15 years ago I didn’t even have a mobile phone (imagine a teenager without one now!). Do we need to be constantly connected? Do we need to be constantly updating everyone on what we’re doing? The answer is probably “no” to both of those questions – you’d get bored soon if we were constantly giving updates anyway! Maybe this trip will give us a new outlook? Until then, we’ll wait for the parcel in the post!

As we wrote the blog post a couple of days ago, we had been aware that there had been a little bit of rain overnight. OK, that’s maybe an understatement – there had been torrential downpours and we had been mere inches away from it striking the roof of Bertha as we slept over the cab. We had noted that the carpet in the middle of Bertha was a little damp in the morning, but it wasn’t until later that we noted the drips coming from the edge of one of the skylights. Great. Oh, and the damp in the top rear corner was even damper, and when we took off the rear window blind we found yet more rotten timber and some useless bathroom sealant that had probably worn away years ago. Time to set our master craftsman brother-in-law to work with a tarpaulin to try to keep the rear corner dry!

The rain was incessant, so we focussed on finishing the floor; cutting the polystyrene sheets to size and fitting the top layer of plywood. I’ll admit that I (Steve) had a little bit of a meltdown (to rival those of our nearly 3 year old neice!) with regards to the finish of the floor. I wanted it to be perfect, but trying to marry up old and new wood has left the new floor slightly bowed and I should have put an extra batten across, but it’s a vast improvement on what was there previously!

We also took time to check out our Paloma boiler which had been leaking water when we turned on the fresh water pump, so we unscrewed it, took it off the wall and found that our predictions were correct. There was a classic freeze split in the copper pipe. At least that should be fixable some other time with some solder and plumber’s putty.

By this time the rain had stopped and the tarpaulin which was rigged over the rear corner had kept the outside dry enough to seal. We let our brother-in-law have first dibs at using the nasty Sikaflex; he re-did some a couple of the seams that had been too high for us to reach last time, then I hopped onto the roof to remove the bathroom sealant around the skylight and replace it with the proper stuff. Whilst I was up there I also did a bit of a patch job on one of the connection points of the roof cage that was looking a little exposed.

All too soon it was time to head back to our London lives and say farewell to Bertha for another couple of months, but not until we’d had a photo taken with our Lego alter egos!

After two and a half months away from Bertha, we were excited to see her again this weekend. When we last saw her, she was very damp and a little unhappy, so we patched her up and left her with a heater and dehumidifier inside to see if we could dry her out and cheer her up. When we arrived on Friday night, we were very pleased to see that the floor was indeed dry, but still very rotten. There was just a little damp patch on a batten in the top rear corner that we’ll have to attend to at some point soon.

First job on Saturday morning was ripping up the floor and removing the top layer of plywood on the walls. As there’s not really space for two of us to work with sharp tools in that little corner, Kiri set to it carefully with a chisel whilst I had a look at replacing the lighting above the bench. Our previous lighting above the bench consisted of some rather dated plastic spotlights, so I unscrewed those, wired in a new switch and an adhesive strip of 12v LED lights. These look more stylish, whilst using less power. Simples!

It took most of Saturday and Sunday to remove the whole section of flooring that was rotten, cutting through the top layer of plywood, the polystyrene and battens below, then what remained of the de-laminated plywood underneath. Whilst Kiri and I hacked away at gently removed the floor, our brother-in-law skilfully replaced the some rotten wood around the step to get into the motorhome, and the fold-out step which had clearly passed its heyday! Finally, we were left with a clean hole where a rotten floor had once been:

A trip to Homebase on bank holiday Monday is not the most pleasant of experiences, but it was necessary in order to get exterior plywood for the new floor, which was duly coated with timber care before we cut it to size and laid it. With holes needed in the floor for the fresh water inlet and table base, we did some precision measuring and some not-so-precise drilling. Add a few battens to the top, and we’re vaguely water-tight – just some polystyrene and a top level of ply still needed.

It’s a big psychological boost to know that we have a solid floor once again in the rear – all of the other jobs (replacing the rear walls, fixing the leak in the boiler, replacing the gas system, fitting a solar panel, fitting a bike rack, making new curtains, re-upholstering the cushions, etc)…hmmm, I was going to say that they will seem minor in comparison, but actually there’s still a lot of work to do!

What’s the difference between a motorhome and a canal boat? It turns out, not much! Over the bank holiday weekend we joined 4 good friends on a narrowboat (why do I want to call it a longboat…?) on the Trent and Mersey canal. Whilst giving us a glimpse of a slower way of living, it also was good to draw parallels between portable life on water and portable life on the road.

Obviously the major similarity is the rationing of utilities – you have to carry all of the fuel and water that you are to use. In a canal boat, weight isn’t too much of an issue, so there were 3 large gas canisters, 4 large batteries, a diesel tank that could last for two weeks and a fresh water tank that filled most of the bottom of the boat. So, scale is different, but there’s still the idea that you’ve got finite resource – for example the engine has to run in order to charge the leisure batteries so electricity is a finite resource and if you leave the tap running, you’re going to run out of drinking water at some point.

As for choosing where to stop for the night, it’s a case of always noting possible spots in case the planned mooring point isn’t reachable. One of the less attractive sides of both canal boating and motorhoming is the removal of human waste – fortunately the waste tanks in the hired boat were large enough to last without us having to “pump out”. Getting into the mindset of using public toilets where possible was good training though.

All of this is focussing on the practical side of things though – it’s the lifestyle that’s one of the most beautiful things. Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

Life is a journey, not a destination

With the canal boat we started and ended the weekend in the same place – there was no destination that we were aiming for and we were able to spend time appreciating the journey. I guess it’s a similar thing with motorhoming – you have the flexibility that comes with travelling with your home on your back. Whilst it’s necessary to occasionally top up with those things that are finite resources, for the main part, spontaneity is king. That’s one of the things we’re really looking forward to in our trip around Europe.

We’ve put a couple of photos from our canal boating weekend on our Flickr account (flickr.com/lightbulbheaduk).

To end, we’ll briefly go back to the question asked at the beginning of this post and give another answer – there is one very big difference – you’re not likely to sink in a motorhome!

So we got to the end of our Lenten plastic fast and here is the sum of the plastic we bought in the 40 days:

We then split the pile into the stuff that we can’t recycle (bottom left) and that which we can (bottom right). We think that it’s not bad going for 40 days, although as blogged about previously, we couldn’t survive without plastic totally for that time. In addition to our previously declared “failures” (where we’ve bought plastic), in the last couple of weeks we added:

• A bag of cous cous – this was to accompany stuffed aubergines that we did when we had friends round, and we couldn’t find it anywhere without plastic packaging.
• A bag of rice – as above, we were entertaining and had decided to do a vegetable curry…which you have to have rice to go with. Try as we might, the only rice without plastic packaging that we found was risotto rice.
• More vegetable stickers – to our joy we discovered satsumas in cardboard packaging, so that reduced the number of stickers, but we still ended up with lots of pepper, apple and aubergine stickers!
• Two bottles of Pepsi – now this one we’re really embarrassed about…we entirely forgot that we were doing the plastic fast until we came to recycling them after buying and consuming them!
• Antibiotics – unavoidable really!

So two weeks have now passed since Easter and has our outlook on plastic changed in life? We’d like to say “yes”…but if we’re being honest, the convenience and cost of things in plastic mean that we’ve strayed a bit. Why would we buy individual peppers at 80p each when we could get a bag of 4 “basics” peppers for the equivalent of 37p each? We also immediately re-stocked the herbs and spices as well as buying a jar of peanut butter once we could buy plastic again (small pleasures!).

Where possible we still buy our vegetables loose – onions and carrots rolling about in the bottom of a basket aren’t any inconvenience for us. We’re determined to continue making our own bread – it may take a little longer, but it’s cheaper and you can’t beat the smell of fresh bread! We’ve also tried to keep the amount of meat that we eat low, as that previously was an area of our diet that generated lots of plastic.

All in all it’s been an interesting journey of awareness for us and we’d really recommend the experience to anyone else. Will we do the same again next Lent? Probably not…but we’ll try to do something equally as creative!

Nearly a month after we bought Bertha (our beast of a 1990 motorhome), we’ve finally had a free weekend to start some work on her. We chose to begin by giving her a good clean inside and out, but also by investigating a little damp bit of carpet we’d spotted beneath the rear seat in the back corner (opposite the toilet). We’d done some detective work online and found this posting about some damp made by the previous owner back in 2010 (shortly after he bought her), however we didn’t know the extent of any fixes he had made.

After we’d dismantled the seat, stripped back the carpet and pulled away rotten and sodden walls, this is what we’re left with:

So we set up a heater to dry it out so that we can assess the damage a little more, but we think we’ve found the culprit – the seams at the rear were pretty badly sealed (as mentioned in the previous owner’s posting). So we cleaned the seams properly and as we were doing so, the wooden batons inside changed from damp to wet. We then applied a little bit of lots of Sikaflex (caravan sealant – nasty stuff to work with) and have left it to dry with the heater sorting out the interior. Once that’s done we can replace all of the rotten batons, polystyrene insulation and plywood inside. Here’s one of the seams in all its glory – covered first in nastiness, then cleaned, then slathered in Sikaflex:

In other news, as we tested out the water pump for the first time today, water gushed from our Paloma heater (obviously added by the previous owner as per his posting). We checked the drainage plug on the heater which was very stiff and very closed, so we guess that water was left in there during the winter, which has burst a pipe or component inside. What fun! That’s for another time!

As for the cleaning? Well, Bertha is now much cleaner on the outside and we’ve made a start on the inside, but there’s still plenty to do!