What a roller coaster year 2018 has been for us. We’ve had massive (and literal) highs, starting on 1 January when we woke to find we were the most watched video on the BBC website – that was one surreal day! But we’ve had heartbreaking lows too. The first half of the year was mostly spent nursing our beloved little dog Charlie (our very own littlest MoHo!), and pootling around slowly in the motorhome with him before we finally had to say goodbye in June. We miss him every day. A week or so later, we managed another high, tinged with sadness, as Jay competed in the Zermatt half marathon in early July.

We’ve crossed a few more things off our bucket lists too – standing by the Cutty Sark to watch Mo Farah and my best mate run the London Marathon, going to our first festival in a motorhome (and Carfest was such a blast we’ve already booked for next year), taking part in our local half marathon, running our first Park Runs (and subsequent ones in Paris and The Eden Project as well as a few other locals ones with our running club mates) and flying high on a zip wire in the French mountains.

We self-published another book – The Motorhome Touring Handbook. I think this is the book I am most proud of, it certainly took the longest to write. We’ve managed to put down pretty much everything we’ve learned about motorhoming on our travels in one place. Our hope is it’ll encourage more folks to travel in a campervan or motorhome, and we’re really pleased we’ve had some lovely feedback about it. Regular visitors to this site will also notice that we’ve given it a refresh this year, but more importantly we’ve done a lot of work in the background so hopefully it’ll be easier to find what you are looking for.

We’ve achieved a few goals too, mainly personal fitness ones based around running – including Jay running his first baby Ultra marathon. Having spent quite a bit of time back home in Nottingham, we’ve also developed a great circle of friends in our local running club – The Kimberley and District Striders.

We only managed four months away in the motorhome in 2018 over a couple of trips, probably because we like it so much at home and we’d been away such a lot in previous years. During the first trip we ambled around France and Switzerland before catching the Tour de France in the Alps. On another we spent a couple of weeks in Paris in our motorhome, and it’s now a firm favourite city for us. We kept our overnight location map up to date, which now has over 900 places across Europe, a wonderful record or us (our memories aren’t that great!) and possibly a source of destination ideas for others.

At the end of January 2018 I wrote a blog post with our goals and plans for the year – how did we do?

• Jay run Zermatt Half marathon – Done
• Ju local running club timed 5k in under 30 mins – Done in 28 mins 43 secs
• Ju Half Marathon – Done Robin Hood Half Marathon in Nottingham in 2:22
• Learn Spanish – eeer not done, might need to look at that in 2019!
• Europe’s longest zip wire – Sort of done, wasn’t the one in Wales but I prefer the one we did
• Go to a festival in Zagan – Done twice – Carfest and Eastwoodstock
• Spend more time abroad in Zagan – Four months was enough for us this year!

It’s great to be able to look back and see how we have done compared with what we said we were going to do. I don’t mind that we haven’t done them all, they have given us some direction in our lives and those left over ones give us something to do next year.

Oh, money-wise, our madcap early retirement/financial independence plan is still ticking along too. We chatted about it in this video a few weeks back, or you can download Funding Freedom for free, to see what we’re doing.