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!

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!

We’ve just bought a Chinook!

It’s amazing what extra expenses and hassles there are that come with it though…not quite the walk in the park that we were hoping for. For a start the tax is quite expensive, but luckily due to its age we won’t have to worry about it in a couple of years.

If only the cost were the sole thing to cause issues when it came to insurance! It turns out that very few insurers are willing to provide cover for something of that size and age, especially if it’s to be used internationally. Finally we receive a quote from Safeguard which, although quite dear, seemed quite good in that it also included breakdown cover, even outside of the UK. With few other options we went for it…only to read the small print and find out that because the Chinook is over 20 years old, the breakdown cover wasn’t actually included, as the underwriters (the AA) wouldn’t provide cover. A quick call to the AA revealed that they were very happy to cover us and the clause was something added by Safeguard.

So off we went in search of someone who would provide breakdown cover for us, at which point our plans for the trip around Europe in the Chinook were forced to change. You see it turns out that whilst insurance companies may be happy for you to be in Europe for a year, breakdown providers aren’t quite singing from the same hymn sheet. The AA and the RAC are willing to provide cover for periods of 90 days at a time…not quite the 365 days that our trip may take. Britannia go one step better with trips of 180 days at a time. It looks like we’ll have to compromise and have two trips rather than one! We’re not complaining though – we get to break up our trip and see our families for a bonus time in the middle! Good times.

But back to the woes of the purchase of a mode of transport such as the Chinook…! As it was a private sale, we set up a pre-arranged bank transfer during the week to move the money across from our account to the seller’s account yesterday (the date of purchase). In the days of internet banking, you’d think it would be a stress-free affair to move money from one account to another. When we checked our account yesterday morning, the money had left – good news. To cut a long story (involving 4 phone calls to our bank and the seller calling their bank a similar number of times) short (although not cutting a long sentence short by adding in brackets!), the money still hasn’t made it to the seller’s account and our bank “cannot explain where the money is”. We are very blessed in that the seller trusts us and we’re praying that the money is in their account on Monday.

At approximately 4:30pm on 9 March 2013 we became the proud owners of our Chinook…and here she is:

Oh, did we forget to say that she’s a Talbot Express Autotrail Chinook motorhome? Sorry about that. The photo at the top of the page is just a holiday snap from a couple of years ago in the lake district. And the name of our Chinook? “Bertha the Beast”.

This is happening! We’ve been cultivating the idea of a road trip in Europe as our honeymoon for a long time now, and the planning is starting in earnest (ooh, possible name for our motorhome if it had a slightly different spelling…?). For several months we’ve been scouring the “interwebz”, keeping an eye on what we should be looking for when purchasing a motorhome and along the way putting together a list of useful links (incidentally europebycamper.com is at the top of the list). We’ve also had invaluable help from a good friend who knows about these things!

Some of the key points about buying a motorhome that came out of our research were:

• We need a fixed bed – we’ll be living in this van, and we don’t want the hassle of making up a bed every night. A coachbuilt MH (see, we’re using the lingo already!) looks like the best option for this.
• It needs to have a MAM (maximum authorised weight) of less than 3.5 tonnes – both of us have a category B driving licence
• Our budget for a van is around £6000 – this was set through a combination of advice from the Europe by Camper buyer’s guide, but also by having a look around online at what was out there, and what we would be able get for different budgets
• Left hand or right hand drive should have no bearing – we’ll explain why in more detail below

There are a few other things that are on our list, such as a reversing camera, LED lighting (uses less battery), carbon monoxide detectors (essential with gas in a small space), bike rack (we intend to cycle to get around towns and cities) and an awning, but all of those are things that we can fit ourselves. Mechanical soundness goes without saying as essential (although we just said it…so obviously it doesn’t!).

All that is great in theory though, and you can spend hours looking at pictures on a computer screen, but nothing beats getting up close and personal with a real live van. Well, some things beat it, but not in the context of searching for a future home! So yesterday, accompanied by our motorhome expert, we had a mini road trip around West Sussex and Hampshire looking at a few contenders. We were really surprised at the variation in quality of the vans we saw within our budget – some were in great nick for their age (all were from the late 80s or early 90s) and others were…well…let’s say I wouldn’t want to spend a night in them! Whilst we were looking at size, comfort, bodywork and potential quality of living, our trusted friend was looking at engine, chassis and other mechanicals. Of the 6 we saw, 1 stood out, which we’ll hopefully head back to for a second date…we mean viewing at some point to look in a little more detail!

So, the LHD and RHD (left hand drive and right hand drive) debate…! When we started our search, we were adamant that we would only look at LHDs for safety and visibility reasons. I (Steve) have experience of driving several LHD vehicles on the right hand side of the road, so thought it would be best to stick with what we know already. Having then spoken with a couple of friends who have motorhomes which they’ve driven on the continent, it became clear that actually it’s less of a safety issue, and more like a minor inconvenience to have a RHD. If you’re in a LHD on the “wrong” side of the road, that’s two things that are “odd”, which in an emergency situation might not add up to a happy ending. If you’re in a RHD on the “wrong” side of the road, your visibility at junctions will obviously be an issue, but then we both drive, so we can just act like rally drivers…in terms of having a co-driver, rather than speed!

In any case, yesterday’s viewings were useful and we’re not going to jump into anything quickly or blindly.

We thought we would provide a few more details about our planned road trip; our full honeymoon that we’ll take once we’ve been married for a short while. The plan is basically to jump in a camper van (preferably one we’ve bought rather than hi-jacked) and head off on an adventure around Europe. We’ve got a few ideas of what we’d like to do/see (involving creativity and community), but we’ll go there with an open mind. So, step one is getting a camper van, and as you’ll see from the image below, that’s sorted!

Now all we need to do is shrink ourselves to fit inside it. Actually, with a van that size, stuff Europe – we might as well just have a bit of a drive around the English countryside!

More on the road trip at a later date – if anyone has tips on buying a camper van (although possibly more of a motorhome, as pictured), please let us know!