Looking forward and back

I’ve been keeping a diary of our travels as well as both of us updating this blog. When we get back I might see about writing a book as there aren’t many out there about this sort of travelling – I tried to find some when we were thinking of doing it.

I had planned to start it as soon as we set off, but never got around to it until we were in Spain. So I’ve been writing up our time in France when I have chance. Today I got it finished (finally) and as I looked back it mirrored my current feelings. We were at the bottom corner of France about to head over into Spain, but I was having some reservations. France was easy, we’d been a few times before, we speak a bit of the language and it’s a very motorhome friendly culture – way more so than the UK. We knew very little about Spain, the culture, language or where we could sleep at night.

When we moved from Spain to Portugal it didn’t seem so bad. We were touring with Chris, Tina, Jacqui and Marc and we were able to walk over the bridge at Tui and see that it wasn’t so different. But now we’re facing a crossing over a border to another continent – Africa. We hear it’s a culture shock (think of the market scenes in Indiana Jones) and we know very little about it.

J spent today doing some research. Dave’s insurance company won’t cover him (grrr) but we can buy some cover once we get there. The web says officially documents have to be signed at a vets then sent to a government department for stamping to get Charlie into the country (and we thought the problem would be getting him back into Europe!), but the word on the street seems to be that no one does that. So it’s a bit of a mystery and will probably be a nerve wracking adventure finding it all out. But I know we’ll regret it if we don’t do it.

We started today with a full English a la Algarve cooked up by J.

And we’re ending it doing more planning for our next few days, weeks and months as we don’t want to end up in Greece in the height of summer. Which Charlie finds a bit boring.

Ju x