2020 Review Of Our Motorhome Year

I can’t believe it’s mid-February already! I try to write a review of our motorhome year annually, unless I’ve done specific motorhome trip reviews like our 2019 tour to France and Switzerland. I wrote reviews for 2018 and 2016, and should really have written the 2020 review of our motorhome year at the end of December last year. However, I’ve been kept busy proof reading our latest book (little excited squeal noise) The 200, as well as the 2021 edition of our Motorhome Touring Handbook, making this my first blog post of 2021, so please indulge me while I provide you with a belated 2020 review.

2020 Review of Our Motorhome Year

Spoiler alert, although I’m pretty sure you all know what’s coming. 2020 was the strangest year I have ever lived through. Yet despite a global pandemic, we still managed to clock up 6,308 kilometres (3,920 miles) in our motorhome, and spent 133 nights in the van.

It all started off pretty normal with us back home in Nottinghamshire to see in the New Year, then skedaddling off on the ferry to Spain on the 11th January to miss the worst of the winter weather. The weather had it’s revenge on us though on the ferry crossing (there’s a video of the crossing in this blog post, as well as some top tips if you are thinking of getting the ferry from the UK to Spain), as we managed to find ourselves in a storm almost as soon as we set off, which saw the outside decks closed (I felt so sorry for the people with pooches in the kennels) and even the strongest of seasickness tablets not working.

You can probably guess how relieved we were to arrive in Spain, where we had a couple of nights in the free aire at Santander to recover before heading south. As we got closer to the middle of Spain, the weather got colder and soon we found a light smattering of snow – it’s not just rain in Spain that falls mainly on the plain! Undeterred we parked up in an aire outside Madrid and spent a couple of chilly days exploring this great city. We wrote a guide for anyone thinking of exploring Madrid in their motorhome.

We went to Spain for some sun, so after a quick stop at Aranjuez (an ACSI campsite just below Madrid which turns out is most folks’ mid-point stop off between the Costas and the ferry home) we drove south arriving in Nerja on the 26th January, at the campsite I am currently sat in typing this! A strange thing happened when we reached Nerja. The campsite is €25 a night, or €400 for a month and after looking around the town for a day or two, we decided to try and stay for a month. I say try because this felt like a massive decision for us, we normally move on every couple of days, only twice ever stretching it out to two weeks in our years of motorhome touring. But there was something about Nerja, the town, the sea, the mountains and the community on the campsite that persuaded us to stay. We loved our time getting to know the area, visiting the famous Nerja Caves, walking through fields of avocados to the beautiful pueblo blanco of Frigiliana, getting our feet wet walking up the Rio Chillar, enjoying the local Carnival, learning something about the area’s civil war history, watching everyone (yes quite possibly the whole town) cycling on Andalusia day, running and hiking in stunning scenery and eating our own bodyweight in tapas, ice cream and pizzas. It turned out to be an equally tough decision to leave.

The reason we were in Spain was to run the Malaga Half Marathon in March. We could have easily stayed a couple more weeks in Nerja before nipping a few kilometres along the coast for the run, but we decided to tear ourselves away from our pitch (almost literally as Zagan’s hand brake had been on for a month and got a tad stuck) to have a look around Spain’s sherry triangle. On the last day of February we headed inland and had a couple of nights at a campsite by a lake before making our way to the town of Antequera. We’d made a couple of trips to Antequera in the past, to have our previous motorhome Dave’s ‘clonking’ suspension looked at, and for trips to Lidl and the vets while we house sat for six weeks in Valle de Abdaljis, so we always thought of Antequera as a bit of an ordinary place, how wrong were we? No only was there a free aire (always improves a place in our books) but it has Dolmens built in 3000BC, Roman baths and a Moorish citadel as well as a very handily placed churreria for my morning chocolate and churros. Needless to say, we stopped for a few days.

While in Antequera I discovered that some motorcycle racing was taking place over the weekend at the Circuito de Jerez (handily right next to our next destination of Jerez), so we headed over there to see some action. We asked at the circuit where we could park and the marshals pointed to the entrance to the track. In our basic Spanish, we double-checked, we wanted to stay for the whole weekend, not just the day. Another nod and point and we weren’t going to ask again. We stayed by the entrance gates of the race track with our own marshalls watching over us 24 hours a day, wandering in and out as the mood took us and enjoying some free, but high quality, motorcycle racing – can you see why we love motorhome life?

In Jerez de la Frontera (to give it it’s full name) we stayed on an aire behind a motorhome dealer, which had barrels of sherry in reception. Yes we were in the sherry triangle. We stopped for a couple of nights to have a look around the city and take in a tour of a sherry bodegas. We learned that there is so much more to sherry than a glass of Harvey’s Bristol Creme at Christmas, and of course got to do a bit of tasting at the end of the tour.

After Jerez we headed to another corner of the sherry triangle, stopping in a campsite in El Puerto de Santa Maria. Here we caught up with fellow motorhome bloggers Linda and Steven, also known as The Chouters. We spent the day with them looking around the port city of Cadiz as neither of us had done any research, but sometimes that is just the best way. We had chatted with them about the virus that was mainly in Italy, but starting to creep elsewhere into Europe. None of us really knew what it meant, but Linda (as a self confessed ‘prepper’) was already making plans to return to a place they knew well in France. As we were saying goodbye to them, on the Thursday morning we got news that the Malaga half marathon, which was just over a week away, was being postponed until November. Still not fully grasping what the epidemic could come to mean for us, we decided not to go to Malaga (as there would be lots of people there) and instead headed further south to an aire in the small town of Barbate and keep washing our hands for a couple of weeks until it all passed!

On route we tried to stop at a couple of supermarkets only to find the first car park totally full. At the second one we parked on the road and got our first experience of panic buying. The queue for the tills was right across the store, huge areas of shelves were empty and I was almost in tears at the till watching people rubbing on hand sanitiser while an elderly couple stood bewildered at the check-out with a few items wearing the plastic gloves available from the fruit and veg department. Suddenly this virus started to feel very real.

In Barbate, life seemed OK. There were queues outside some of the shops and the supermarket had a few empty shelves, but the ice cream parlours were open, the motorhome aire next to the marina felt safe and there was a lovely beach nearby. That night though, we were woken by people rocking out van. It happens, we know this, but in the middle of the night it is frightening. Not content with rocking the motorhome, but leaning on one of the windows which they cracked, they also thumped the side of the van as they ran off. Already rattled by the virus that now had a name – Coronvirus or Covid-19, we didn’t get much sleep for the rest of the night. The following day I spoke to the neighbours on the aire to see if they had any trouble, they hadn’t, but we decided to head to a campsite and see out the virus there. They said we shouldn’t move as the country was now in a state of emergency, but we decided to go anyway.

Arriving at the campsite, the receptionists were wearing rubber gloves and we soon discovered they weren’t allowing anyone to check-in. As we walked back to Zagan in the car park, we realised that we needed to get home. We set our sav-nav for the fastest route back to Calais and drove. It was a stressful two-day drive across Spain, with toll-booth operators backing away wide-eyed from our credit card as we tried to pay them because the machines weren’t working, to increasingly quiet and errie roads with just convoys of motorhomes one them. We breathed a huge sigh of relief as we crossed the border with France, mainly because we were sure it would shut and we would be stuck. Arriving in Capbreton everything felt normal, cars were on the roads, surfers on the beach, then we remembered – Spain was like this two days ago. We needed to keep moving north.

Another two long driving days, including a 6am start (unheard of for us) and we reached Calais only to be turned away because our train wasn’t until 5pm. To be fair Eurotunnel had been amazing, letting us amend the date of our train as many times as we needed until it got to the point where they were all full. France’s state of emergency was starting at noon, and we weren’t sure we’d be able to drive to the chunnel once that happened, but the operator at the tunnel thought we’d be OK.

We drove to a nearby supermarket and I got, what I later realised was, my first taste of covid-19 shopping. We were given a talk before we entered the shop: we had to queue to go in, leave by a different door and keep our distance from other shoppers. There were lines on the floor and the tills had thin sheets of plastic draped over them to protect the staff. While I shopped noon ticked over and the car park emptied, the only vehicles left now were British and a group of fellas had arrived hoping to sneak into one and get a ride across the channel. We moved to an aire a few kilometres away to watch the hours tick by, before driving back to the tunnel and boarding the train. Both of us letting out an actual sigh of relief and hugging each other as we felt our train gently depart.

There was no information at the chunnel or anywhere else that said we needed to quarantine, but we did. After landing back on UK soil (which has never felt so good) we spent a quiet night at the aire at Canterbury, not venturing out of the motorhome, before we headed home. Jay’s Mum and Dad had taken the precaution of locking themselves in at home (they were later on the shielding list, so at least then it had an official name). We drove past their house, pulling up outside and talked to them on the phone as they stood in the window. Tears flowed as we didn’t know when we would see them again. Back at home we unpacked Zagan, drove him to his storage place, drained him down, locked him up and cycled back home. Locking the gates behind us we didn’t come out for two weeks. We probably needed that time to come to terms with everything that had just happened, and to reset our adrenalin levels which had been sky high for a week. Soon after we arrived home the UK went into lock down, so we emerged from quarantine into a very different world.

Realising that we wouldn’t be going anywhere soon, Zagan was SORNed (which meant we stopped paying his road tax, so we couldn’t drive him on UK roads) and left in his storage place. Once out of quarantine we’d occasionally pop and visit him when out on our ‘once a day’ exercise, turn over his engine, check his battery levels and sometimes move him a little so he was resting on a new bit of tyre. We kept ourselves busy with running, writing and reading books and finally getting around to sorting through our thousands of photos from our travels over the years and making them into photo books.

We helped Jay’s Mum and Dad by doing their shopping for them and slowly the weeks ticked by. We also continued to write blog posts, mainly so we can look back in the future and see what happened. Already I am starting to forget parts of it, the sleepless nights, the surreal dreams, watching the space station fly overhead and ‘Boris o’ Clock’. Our TV would stay turned off until the nightly press conference, then we’d turn it on and pay attention and play a drinking game (sadly it was with water to ensure we were drinking enough, but would have gotten very messy if we used alcohol) where we’d take a swig every time they said ‘unprecedented’ ‘world-leading’ or the slogan of the time correctly, if they got the slogan in the wrong order or missed part of it we downed the rest of the glass.

Slowly things started to open up again, garden centres, car washes and other shops and towards the end of May we looked at what was happening with motorhome travel in the UK and around Europe. In June Jay wrote a blog post encouraging folks to ‘go for it’ and realise their motorhome dreams and gave tips for a motorhome staycation, I doubt his articles were solely responsible for the massive boom in motorhome sales, but I like to think they helped a little. In early July after more than 100 days being stuck at home, motorhome travel was able to restart as overnight stays away from home were allowed, so Zagan started to pay his road tax again and four months to the day that we parked him up, he was packed up and off for a week at a campsite in Edale in Derbyshire.

It was only a short break as we were still shopping for Jay’s parents, but it was such a great feeling to be back in him again. However in our excitement to get away it was almost as if we had forgotten everything we knew about motorhoming. We managed to smash a wing mirror on our way there, as well as getting very stuck several times on narrow roads lined with parked cars – never arrive at a scenic village on a weekend! We soon came to realise why motorhomes are so great in a pandemic, we are fully self-contained – own shower, loo, kitchen etc and everyone keeps to their own pitch (most of which are now a bit more spread out than usual) so you are socially distanced too.

In August we picked up a replacement window for the one that was cracked in Barbate back in March, and fitted it ourselves before setting off for a few days at a campsite overlooking Carsington Water, which is just 40 minutes from our home. Here we walked and ran around the lake several times, met up with some fellow motorhomers and also had our first meal out in over five months. The Government ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme encouraged people to eat out by giving a 50% discount for meals on Mondays, Tuesday and Wednesdays in August. This meant that the local pub we walked past on a sunny Friday afternoon was so quiet, we were happy to pay full price for our meal as we had the beer garden to ourselves. By the end of August Jay’s Mum and Dad were set up and getting the hang of online grocery shopping, so we were able to go away for a little longer. We headed to the North Yorkshire coast and spent a few days at Hook Farm Campsite which overlooks Robin Hood’s Bay. While we love ‘The Cooler’ (our UK base) the one thing it lacks is any sort of view, the windows look out in our yard, so you can understand why we extended our stay here for as long as we could.

While at Robin Hoods Bay, our friends Richard and Jenny who live in York popped over for the day and took us for a socially distanced and mask wearing (in the car) trip to Whitby for some fossil hunting. To get to the fossil beach you have to walk through Whitby Holiday Park, and as our current site was going to be full the following week, we booked ourselves in for a few nights. Then we extended our stay twice more, stopping 11 nights in total. The campsite was perfect for us, right above the fossil beach, so we could nip down and see what the latest high tide had uncovered, and a couple of kilometres along the coastal path to Whitby so I felt like I had earned any ice creams or fish and chips, or at least I would earn them walking back up the 199 steps by the abbey back onto the coastal path.

As the weather turned to autumn our minds whirled with the question of what to do for the winter. At the start of the pandemic it was easy to understand what you should do ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, saves lives’, then we were told to stay alert and work from home if you can, then travel corridors began to open, even though the Foreign Office were still advising against all but essential travel, yet travel insurance firms offered cover that would enable you to travel against foreign office advice.

We spent hours researching what the Government advice was, what cover we could get with various travel insurance providers, what impact Brexit would have (as we planned to stay after the end of the year) as well as talking over the moral and ethical dilemmas of going abroad during a pandemic, before speaking with both sets of parents. The local restrictions meant we could visit them, but only in their gardens, and as the weather turned cooler this was getting less and less appealing for everyone. With their agreement we made the decision to head to Spain for the winter, not to travel around and see the place as we normally would, but to just shift our home from Nottingham to Nerja for a few months. We’d knew that we’d be happy staying on the same campsite for a few months, and even if Spain went into lockdown again (which was much tougher than the UK one) we knew the campsite was a little bit away from the town, very secure behind big gates and had everything we needed to feel safe.

We were booked in at a campsite in Wales for October half term, with the plan being our friends were staying in a cottage nearby so we could meet them for days wrapped up on the beach while their kids played in the sand. However the summer hiatus of cases abruptly stopped and as numbers rose again Wales went into lockdown. This was followed by areas of England going into Tiers, where the top tier forbade travel outside the area. There was talk of Nottinghamshire going into that top tier, probably only for a week but it was enough to get our stress levels up and we made the decision to bring the ferry forward. Our trip to Wales wasn’t cancelled yet, but we figured it would be (it was a week or so later) and instead of heading to Wales we booked into a campsite on Hayling Island for a few days with the thought that if places did go into high tiers or lockdown, we were right next to Portsmouth and the ferry and would be able to catch it if it was still running.

On 23 October we boarded the ferry to Spain. I had I vowed never to do that crossing again after our experience in January, but being stuck in a cabin for 24 hours feeling sick felt a lot safer than driving down through France, so armed with anti-seasick tablets, wrist bands, ginger biscuits and tea we went for it. After advice from fellow travellers who had used the same crossing, we requested a cabin towards the middle of the boat and fortunately the weather was much kinder to us. Arriving in Spain we now had to wear face masks whenever we were outside of the motorhome, but we quickly got used to that and soon UK TV showing people not wearing masks looked strange to us. The case numbers were on the rise in Spain too, with the threat of curfews and closure of the borders to the 17 autonomous regions, so we blasted across the country in a couple of days and made it to the campsite in Nerja a couple of days after the ferry docked.

Zagan was parked up and this time we remembered to leave his handbrake off, and we settled back into campsite life. A few other Brits who were here in February were also back, but after speaking to them it turned out they had never left. We really admired them for this and suspect if it wasn’t for our families back home, we might have done the same. On the drive to Nerja Zagan’s left front wheel had started to make the now all too familiar noise of a wheel bearing about to go, but we weren’t moving for months so would sort it out later. Within a day of arriving Jay managed to chip one of his teeth which couldn’t wait, so he got an appointment with a local dentist whose receptionist spoke English. Unfortunately it wasn’t going to be an easy repair and several further appointments would be needed including one for root canal treatment.

While we waited between appointments we finally published one of the books we had been writing during lockdown. The Non-Trepreneurs answers the often unasked question that we see in people’s eyes ‘how are you travelling around so much when you are still so young, have you won the lottery?’. Regular readers of this blog will know that we haven’t won the lottery, but we have achieved financial freedom not by being entrepreneurs, but by being ‘non-trepreneurs’. We basically spend less than we earn, but of course there is much more to it than that, enough to fill a book in fact.

Just over a week after we arrived in Nerja we got the phone call from home that no one ever wants to receive. Jay’s Mum had suffered a stroke and had been taken to hospital. Due to Covid restrictions his Dad couldn’t go with her and no one could go and see her, but mercifully she was unconscious. We tried to get Zagan’s wheel fixed so we could drive back home, but after two mechanic no shows, we made plans to fly back.

There were only a couple of flights a week from Malaga airport to East Midlands, but after talking it through we didn’t rush to book on the first flight home, instead we booked the next one. When we did get home we would have to go into quarantine for two weeks, so we wouldn’t be able to visit Jay’s Mum in hospital or see his Dad, who rang us each day after he got a telephone update from the hospital, so there was nothing to rush back for. As the days went by the prognosis got worse, and sadly Jay’s Mum passed away just a week after her stroke, never regaining consciousness. It was probably a really selfish thing to do, but by not getting that first flight it meant when we did get the news she had died we could go and sit on the beach and cry – which made it much more bearable. A few days later we were collected by a taxi from the campsite gates and flew home.

The quarantine this time was much harder than in March. Now the days were cooler so would couldn’t sit out in the yard, and there was much more life going on the other side of the gates. In the end though we quarantined ourselves for nearly three weeks, so we knew that we would be virus free and able to travel with and provide much needed hugs to Jay’s Dad at the funeral. Before the funeral took place Jay’s Dad was already encouraging us to go back to Spain. It felt wrong, surely he would need our support, but after several long chats with him we realised we wouldn’t be able to do much more for him if we stayed. The borders within in Andalusia were still closed, so if there were flights (which there weren’t for most of December) we would be able to get to Malaga, but not back to the campsite (not legally anyway). In the end we took a punt, and booked a flight close to Christmas, which would still enable us to get a PCR test done within 72 hours of arriving in Spain, then we crossed our fingers and hoped that the borders would reopen for the festive season.

Our flight was on Monday 21st December, and fortunately the Junta of Andalusia reopened its internal borders on Friday 18th December. On the same day the UK announced a new strain of the virus, and over the weekend countries around the world started to ban flights from the UK. We were glued to the news all weekend until finally Spain said it was going to hold a meeting to decide what to do on Monday at 11am, for once having a stupid early o’clock flight time was going to work in our favour. We landed, got through all the extra checks at the airport, including temperature tests, checking our PCR paperwork and locator forms to complete, and once more breathed a massive sigh of relief as we pulled away from the airport car park (one of our fellow campsite dwellers was kind enough to come and pick us up).

We got back a few days before Christmas, giving us time to restock Zagan with food before the shops closed. We kept to ourselves on the campsite mainly because of all the news about the new British strain of virus and how we had just squeaked in before the borders closed. Christmas and New Year were very quiet, but we didn’t mind that, we were just very happy to be back in Nerja, and reunited with Zagan, who had been fine in storage at the campsite despite our minds conjuring up thoughts of fire, flood and mouse infestation!

As midnight struck here in Spain on the 31st December, Brexit was finally done. Ever since the UK voted to leave back in 2016, we’ve had a good idea how this would affect British motorhome travellers, the main one being we are only allowed to be in the Schengen zone for 90 in every rolling 180 day. Towards the end of 2020 some deals were done and details published which made the implications for motorhome travellers a bit clearer, things like not needing a International Drivers Permit (phew, because we didn’t buy any), but EU Pet Passports no longer being valid (which no longer affects us personally). There are still some uncertainties, like what actually happens if you do overstay your Schengen visa? but as the weeks and months of 2021 pass, I am sure these will all become clearer. We’re not taking any chances though, and have booked our ferry back to the UK for the end of March.

2020 Review of Motorhome Year – Costs

I like to include a review of our costs in these round ups, so you can get an idea of how much, or little, motorhome life will set you back (you can find loads of cost breakdowns for our trips and years in the money section of this blog). However to steal a much used word from the daily briefings, 2020 has been ‘unprecedented’. We haven’t spent that much time at home since we became financially independent back in 2015, so our costs for the year aren’t really reflective of motorhome life. That said, I know folks do love to nose through what other people are spending, and you never know you might want to split your time between van and house too – so below you can see a breakdown of what we spent during 2020.

Being at home so much, with the shops closed quite a lot of the time, meant we had fewer things to spend our money on. This probably explains why our supermarket spend was £500 more this year than it was in 2019! While we aim to spend around £20,000 each year on day to day life, in 2020 we only managed to spend a little over £17,000, and that includes replacing both our mobiles, a new (to us) Kindle for Ju and buying a new laptop (these are in the supplies/misc category along with stuff like face masks, prescription glasses, books and haircuts).

So I guess that’s it. Our 2020 review of our motorhome year, all wrapped up in one blog post, albeit a little later than usual. I personally can’t wait to find out what 2021 will bring. As vaccination programs unfold, hopefully we’ll all have more freedom to travel again once each of us feels comfortable enough to do so. Whatever happens and wherever you go, make 2021 a fantastic year.

Ju x