Excitement!
In the true spirit of the OurTour blog, I’m, ah, crafting(?) this blog post at half past midnight having seen off a good part of a bottle of Bardelino. In a good old English April cold snap, I’m sat alongside our wood burner, which to be honest has long done with its heating for the night, having eaten through a good part of our old outbuilding’s chopped-up door.
I’m sat here excited. Child like! Our outbuilding conversion to create a wee UK crash pad for us is close to completion, so close I can sniff it. Formally named ‘The Cooler’, partially from the fact it held two butcher’s walk-in cold rooms, but perhaps more related to the famous prison room from The Great Escape, the little place means a great deal to us.
To most people it looks like a cramped, tiny room to live in.
To us it looks like freedom. Pure heart-racing freedom. And it looks big to our new eyes.
By downsizing our lives still further, we’re casting off many of our self-imposed adult constraints and grabbing at our chance to have both the stability of somewhere to live in the fabulous UK, plus the chance to hit the road again. Later in 2015 we have a plan to do just that, to get our butts out there into Europe and sniff at the mountain air for a while, a couple of months maybe. We’ll find ourselves another motorhome, and just turn south. 2016 calls for even more madcap motorhome fun.
In anticipation of forthcoming frivolity, we’ve, well, tarted up this blog a bit. Feel free to send over any feedback to us and we’ll do our best to sort the thing out so you can use it as you want to – julieandjason@ourtour.co.uk, or leave us a comment below. There are hundreds, soon to be thousands of posts and pages on here and we want to try and make it all as accessible as possible – please help!
New OurTour Blog Format, created with much nerves and excitement in the spring of 2015
Right, best yet off to bed, more IKEA wardrobe building in the morning. Cheers, Jay
Brilliant, looking forward to your posts for 2016, only wish it was me! good luck.
Thanks Ron, so looking forwards to getting out there again, I can hardly contain myself. :-) cheers, Jay
Great articles. . I buy n sell old vans. . Just bought an old camper lhd. . In malaga! Flew out from uk. . . . Unfortunately had to drive straight back in the old bus!. . . I could see africa over the water!!. . . Soo close to freedom. . . But edging closer to that freedom. . . . Mick
Hi Mick, shame you couldn’t spend a few days wandering Spain! Keep going though mate, keep pushing on, one day you’ll be there. Or over the Med in Africa if you so desire! Cheers, Jay
The download as a pdf option has gone. Will it come back Jay?
Hi Kev, good spot! We put the PDF option on there to let folks get copies of articles to use offline (we know well how much fun Internet access can be on the road). Latest thinking is we may scrape all posts for each tour we do, sort out the horrendous spelling, pop them into a single PDF and publish (probably at a reasonable price to incentivise us to actually get it done). Watch this space (wouldn’t recommend breath holding though, still have a full time job at the mo)! Cheers, Jay
Like the new site – well done, I did used to love your banner photographs on the old site. Very envious thinking of you heading back on the road and, at the same time, very impressed at the sheer determination and hard work you put in to get where you want to be. Not sure when/if we will get back travelling again – driving across America is on my wish list. But I think your little dog is much cheaper to keep than our two ‘children’ and even though they are now in their 20’s we are still helping them out financially. Good luck with everything – Kath & Dave
Thanks guys! You could buy your kids a copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad, and point them at the Mr Money Moustache blog, and maybe you’d never have to support them financially again? :-) Cheers, Jay
Great to see you are heading back out there. We are about to do 2 weeks to the Peak and Lake district around me working in Leeds for a couple of days. Then we are heading south for 3 months from August of which one month will be walking the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain, a long time dream of mine ever since I read Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage. Maybe see you on the road somewhere. Jane, Steven & Ellie (the van) in Norfolk
Hi guys. The Camino looked like a really beautiful walk (well, about 1000 different walks it seemed). Some distance too, I’d never make it, hats off to you. Hope to bump into you one day in some distant corner! Cheers, Jay
Happy travels guys xxx
Cheers Nicky! A few months in the cubicle yet… Hope all’s well in your fab campsite, surely the best in the Balkans! We’ll be heading for Turkey at some point so we’ll make sure we head in your direction when we head through Bulgaria. Cheers, Jay
Hi Guys. Great to hear that you’ll be back on the road again later in the year. We loved following your excellent blog last time, and have made good use of your info. and some of your stopping places, this winter in the Peloponnese. We’re on limited data at the mo, so haven’t had a chance to look at your new site much. .I see you’ve got a link to all the European aires.. We generally prefer the unofficial places, which I know you’ve used extensively – Is there some way we can download all of them as a list of lat. long. or better a file to put on Google Maps or Autoroute etc? We, like others, have a similar link on our site.
Best Wishes from already! stinking hot Greece
Cheers, Peter and Elaine
Hi Peter and Elaine
The evil green eye of the jealous is on you! It must be quite beautiful down there, all the nicer to imagine when it’s lashing it down up here in Blighty. I’m with you on the unofficial spots, although to be fair last time we mixed up aires, free camping spots, hotel car parks and the odd campsite, whatever worked at the time.
I’ll spend some more time on the downloads, but some guys have already done a fab job of it. Europe by camper’s blog and Do Your Dream come to mind.
Have fun, hope to see you on the road, Jay
I am really pleased to hear you are planning to travel again. Your blog has been the main inspiration to plan my own motorhome tour which I hope to do in a year or two. Keep up the blogging and love the new site. Steve
Top man, thanks Steve! Hope to meet you somewhere in Europe with a fab view and maybe a glass of vino. :-) cheers, Jay