Our Top Ten Scariest Motorhome Driving Experiences

Travelling in a motorhome’s been an incredibly fulfilling experience for me and Ju (and we like to think the wee man Charlie too). We’ve felt a sense of incredible freedom in the ability to go almost wherever we wanted whenever we wanted, to stay in simply beautiful places, and to find a high degree of inner peace in living a simple life. In the interest of balance in all things though: life on the road in a multi-tonne rolling bungalow on wheels brings the occasional face full of cold-water-fear when driving the routes of Europe and North Africa, most of which isn’t warranted, but we face it nevertheless.

For some (most?) of you hardy lot, you’ll lose no sleep over this stuff, but for others we want show some solidarity. Over time there’ll probably be a few roads which have your eyes wide, hands white and arm hairs on end. These are ours, and thankfully we survived ’em all without a scratch (on us that is: our vans have had a few scrapes).

Fun Drive 1: Kaboom! Exploding in Spain

Although I passed my driving test aged 17 (on my third, terrifying attempt), I avoided driving anywhere alone until I was at least 22; I was that afraid of the road. Ironically, that choice could well have killed me and my two mates when, having refused to do my share of driving in an epic 10 day cross-USA road-trip, we all fell asleep at 60mph on an endless road in the desert. We woke up pretty sharpish as we bounced along besides the road with bushes flying over the car, and by some black magic my mate managed to miss the all obstacles getting us back up onto the black top. Anyway, sorry, sorry, I digress!

By the time we came to start our first long tour back in 2011, that was way behind me. I’d been driving for over 15 years without crashing, including several trips to France, Germany and Belgium in our campervan (I’m not including an array of motorbike crashes, or that time someone rear-ended our hired removals van, or the time someone drove into the side of my VW Polo, and maybe a few other minor dings…). So when we came to start touring in our motorhome Dave, I wasn’t all that nervous about the driving, although I had nerd-idly analysed the various problems we might face and ranked driving as the number 1 danger.

Nothing happened for the first few weeks as we pootled our way down through France, giddy at the sensation of escape, having replaced the skylight which we lost on day 1, fixed the warm fridge and tried to explain we needed a new leisure battery in French. Over into Spain and a few days in, a rather large bang on a motorway threw reality at us somewhat starkly. The tyres on Dave were, how should I say, knackered when we bought him, and in our fear of spending our freedom fund we could have ended the tour there and then. An aged, cracked and worn rear tyre gave up trying to hold on, ripping itself apart and smashing the wheel arch, bending the drop-down step and, in a cloud of dust, blew apart one of the seat cupboards inside the van.

I was driving at the time and my initial flash of thought was that we’d snapped in two like the Titanic. I got on the brakes and pulled us onto the hard shoulder, which catapulted Charlie over my left shoulder from the seat bench behind me and into the footwell, where he struggled free, dazed but unharmed. Getting out and inspecting the damaged van I realised I’d cocked up big style: the cost of new tyres is nothing compared with the potential physical harm to us if this happened again.

Lessons learned: The van was completely fixed and mostly paid for by insurance, but we learned to inspect the tyres and consider swapping them as soon as they get old (over five years) or wear out (for us this happens before they get five years old anyway). I considered buying cheaper tyres at one point, being vigorously persuaded by you guys not do this, and have since only fitted big brand rubber to our motorhomes. We should also have restrained Charlie (by law in some countries) although I have to admit he was usually free to walk around the van but Ju ensured he wasn’t able to get at the driver or any controls.

Fun Drive 2: Through the Dark Heart of Bucharest

Whenever we have to do something a bit tough these days, we joke about the day we drove through Bucharest, capital of Romania. What could be worse than that? It was a Friday afternoon, and we’d come over the border from Bulgaria that morning and were heading to the city’s only campsite to the north, so we needed to take the ring road around the city. We plugged in the GPS co-ordinates of the site and headed off, blissfully unaware of the fact we’d soon be fighting for street space with every van, tram, truck and car in the country.

We can’t blame Bucharest for our hours of forcing our way through endless streams of vehicles, but we do anyway, harumph. The fact we hadn’t got Eastern Europe in our satnav didn’t exactly help of course (ahem), and when we missed the ring road the screen went blank and off we went into the Heart of Darkness that is rush hour Bucharest. A local later posted on this video with a smile, saying we’d managed to transform a 15 min trip into a 2 hour drive-athon. Whoops. We did get a good feel for the centre of the city though, driving past Ceaușescu’s palace at one point.

Lessons learned: we since bought a TomTom satnav with full European Maps, which comes with lifetime updates and has served us well in later tours. We also have free and highly recommended the maps.me app on our smartphones, and download offline maps when we’re on WiFi, which is a great back-up in the event of issues with the satnav. We also avoid driving in cities at rush hour, especially on a Friday afternoon!

Fun Drive 3: Whacky Races on the Road to Warsaw

The scariest drives for me are the ones where I have the least amount of control in among high speed traffic, and although the route into Warsaw’s only in at number 3, that’s because there’s no rhyme nor reason to the order of drives. A couple of drives in Poland were probably the ones which stick in my mind as the worst. One was along an A road where a huge black lorry bore down on me like something from Duel, a couple of metres from the back bumper with no turn-offs to escape for miles on end. The second was this one: Route 17 to Warsaw.

The frightening nature of the road was simple: there were only two actual lanes, but each side had a weird dotted half-lane like this image from Google Streetview. This lane was used as a sort of escape lane, to avoid the oncoming kamikaze trucks and cars piling down the gap in the middle like they were aiming for escape velocity, like that Delorean from Back to the Future. I can vividly recall doing 60mph while being overtaken by a breakdown truck with a car on the back, which itself forced all oncoming traffic into the dotted lane on the other side. Batsh*t crazy driving.

To this day I have no idea whether we should have been driving down those dotted-off lanes at all, and if someone had broken down and was parked in one of ’em, they’d be well advised to get out and make for the treeline before their car got mushed to a pulp with them in it.

Lessons learned: none. Other than don’t drive down Route 17 in Poland without at least four espressos in me, some prayer beads handing from the rear view mirror having recently updated my will.

Fun Drive 4: Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself in Marrakesh

And on the flip side: here’s one where the fear of driving turned out to be that much worse than the actual drive itself in good old Marrakesh in Morocco. We first entered the centre of the city in a four by four taxi, provided by the luxury campsite we were staying at to the east of the city. The driver was a tough-looking chap, who silently steered the Landrover through chaos, making liberal use of the horn in place of indicators as he demonstrated what appeared to be raw courage ploughing through the jumble of cars, motorbikes, buses and vans. We nodded at each other when we exited the metal beast at the famous Djeema el-Fnar square, in agreement we’d have been nuts to have driven into the city ourselves.

Fast forwards five years and, perhaps with the anesthetic affect of some of these other drives under our belts, we pointed Zagan at the city and piled in. Twice. The traffic didn’t seem anything like as bad as our fear of it. Sure, turning left across a road meant seeing five or six vehicles either side of you all vying for the same single lane on the other side, but somehow an organic flow took place, like hot treacle, no-one hit anyone, no-one got angry, we all ended up in one piece and on our way. The relatively slow speeds made it feel much safer than the brain-out stuff in Warsaw or even the M1 in the UK. Oh, and I have to admit, hammering away on the horn like a sugar-loaded gibbon is serious fun too.

Lessons learned: it’s not usually as bad as it looks. If you’re reading this and are getting sweaty-palmed at the thought of getting in similar situations, rest assured, you’re not alone, you will do fine, just take your time and don’t get pressured into doing anything nuts. Oh, and have a decent supply of your preferred tipple to reward you when the handbrake finally goes on for the night!

Fun Drive 5: Rules? Them’s Made for Breakin’ in Palermo

Picture this: you’re driving down a busy dual carriageway at 50mph while a steady stream of traffic undertakes you on the hard shoulder. You get to a slip road, expecting these vehicles were impatient to head down it, but no, they just cut straight across it, including a police car. Now, it’s entirely possible our understanding of the Sicilian Highway Code is somewhat lacking, but my guess is they don’t sell many copies of that particular read, and I figured the only rules anyone learned from birth were: Rule 1. you must overtake your fellow driver, in any fashion you can, and Rule 2. try not to hit anyone while obeying Rule 1. It seemed to work, and when we returned back to the city from Tunisia, we found ourselves getting right into the spirit of it, weaving about the city and honking the horn like an enraged four-wheeled white elephant.

Lessons learned: sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Formal rules go out of the window in some of the more far-flung bits of Europe, and there’s zero point getting frustrated by it: that’s the way they do it there, we’ll just do our best to fit in. Oh, and don’t get in the way of the mafia, not that you’ll know who they are of course.

Fun Drive 6: Ain’t Got Time to Bleed on the M1 to London

Alright, I’m serious with this one: the drive down the M1, round the M25 and down the M20 on our way out to wherever is sometimes the worst, most frightening part of an entire tour. In our experience, British roads are, on the whole, rammed busy compared with the majority of routes on the continent. And with congestion comes impatience, and with impatience comes stupidity. I have a theory that the standard of driving across Europe doesn’t vary so much with nationality as it does with the roads folks drive on. Where there are lots of single carriageway winding roads with a mix of slow and fast traffic (Italy, Lincolnshire), you’ll see some bonkers overtaking being pulled off. Where the motorways are packed out and folks are in a rush, they’ll do idiotic stuff.

As I head out onto the M1 I get my head into gear and do my very best to avoid being killed by someone who’s not really bothered if I get killed or not. I’m serious, driving in my country has been among some of the most dangerous, frightening driving I’ve ever done across 30 or 40 countries. An example: driving south on the M1 a slow crane on the inside lane compressed the traffic. I spotted it maybe half a mile ahead and pulled into the middle lane when I could. A National Express bus driver some way behind us saw the inside lane emptying out and opted to undertake a fair few vehicles, catching up the crawling crane just at the point we were about to overtake it. Instead of getting on the brakes he opted to flick his indicators on and try and pull back into the middle lane, into a space we already occupied, and we were surrounded on all four sides by vehicles. Thankfully a long blast of horn woke the guy up and he slowed down before crushing us to death (costing him an on-time bonus maybe?), but not before I’d lost a few more hairs from my rapidly-thinning mop.

Lessons learned: if you can cope with traffic in the UK folks, you can cope with it anywhere.

Fun Drive 7: Oh. My. God. The River Bed Road to Icht

I’m sucking in breath writing this, whooooooooaaaarrr. That was one epic drive, unforgettable and a small triumph in retrospect, but gut-wrenching for the hours it took to get through it. It started with a mistake. I thought a friend who knows Morocco well and lived there for several years told me the road south from the Ait Mansour mountain oasis to Icht, the R107, was now paved, so off we went. Indeed, looking at Google Maps, it looks like a good road, while those thin white lines around Ait Mansour to the top right look a bit nasty, right?

Yeah, well, the those white roads through the Anti-Atlas mountains turned out to be, on the whole, in decent condition, with at least a van’s width of tarmac to ride along on. The R107 south down from Tahouaout was fine, and the landscape around us was other-worldly. There were no other vehicles, just the odd village with a few nippers requesting the usual stuff: bonbons, dirhams, stylos (sweets, money, pens)! On we rolled until eventually the tarmac ran out, but road rollers by the side of the route had been flattening the road ahead of us and we guessed it was maybe a section being improved (we once drove down about 14 miles of road in Tunisia where the entire surface had been removed ahead of roadworks).

Just above the Gite Igmir we stopped and stared in wonder at the road down into the valley. I’m filled with a sensation of adventure and joy thinking back, although what we were doing there in a two wheel-drive 3.5 tonne motorhome was more than a bit daft (read: it was completely idiotic). After a quick inspection of the road, we found it had been widened and flattened since the crazy days when a 4×4 Land Rover could only just creep down it, and so we opted to roll down around the cliff face, finding ourselves on a steep (25%?) dirt-road, 1st gear descent to the Gite, which we guessed we’d never get back up. The Gite itself was across a river bed which we couldn’t do without a 4×4 (or so we thought), so we decided to keep going. From this point onwards it was a one-way journey through the oasis villages, and the most nerve wracking, memorable drive of our lives, read about it here, have a laugh!

Lessons learned: hahahhahaha! Where do I start? Don’t drive for endless miles across rural Moroccan mountains, river beds and sand tracks in a two wheel drive motorhome with bob-all chance of recovery any time soon? At least we had plenty of water and food on board if we had snapped a wheel off. We know a fellow motorhome traveller who fell and shattered their arm in such a remote spot, not good. Moving on…

Fun Drive 8: Elbows in Folks, Back Ache in the Vercors Gorges

Rather closer to home, and more recently, we made yet another navigational error in the Vercors Massif, to the west of the French Alps, south-west of Grenoble. This one, like all of these, cost us nothing but a short-lived sensation of fear as we edged along as fast as we dared, hoping the overhangs wouldn’t remove anything from our roof and we wouldn’t get to hear the gut-wrenching metal-on-metal of a collision with an oncoming vehicle. We didn’t, all was good, and we laughed about it afterwards!

The daft thing with this one was the fact we (I) had done the research. I knew some of the roads in the Vercors Massif are epic balcony roads, amazing to run and cycle but not such a good idea to drive a motorhome down, like this:

My research had thrown up the fact the Gorges du Nan, Gorges de la Bourne and the Combe Laval were (probably) not passable in a 3m high, 2.2m wide motorhome, at least not without losing the rest of the thinning wig-piece. To get a look at these magnificent roads and satiate my interest in them, I ran up the Gorges du Nan and cycled the Combe Laval, and considered that was enough, the Gorges de la Bourne looked too narrow and busy for either, and could wait for when we had more nimble transport. That didn’t happen of course, and we ended up on a stretch of it, sigh:

Lessons learned: clearly if we were capable of learning lessons, we would have by now! We checked the map, we searched for the road on various forums including French ones, and tried to mark up all the dodgy bits. The lesson is perhaps this: the road turned out to be fine, and we got down it without incident, so maybe our research was fine and we should just suck it up…

Fun Drive 9: Chewed up and Spat out in Genoa

We travelled through Genoa in Northern Italy back in 2012. We’d hoped to stay near a train station outside Genoa but it was both busy and expensive, so decided to try and park in the city. Our various sources of information for places to stay turned out to be duds, and we found ourselves getting increasingly frazzled in the hectic port city traffic. We eventually gave up and managed to get onto the elevated SS1 which cuts right across the city, but somehow ended up dropping down into the earth in some huge underground car park thing like a scene from a sci-fi film.

Cities being what they are, a ton of focus is needed to spot all the various hazards and unusual junctions, which I oddly find needs a sort of ‘defocus’ so I don’t spend too much time looking at any one thing. In the end we managed to get out, of course, and were very grateful to find a flat car park overlooking the sea to the east of the city. Throughout our crazed city maze bouncing it rained on and off, with Dave’s wipers refusing to turn off, requiring Ju to pull the fuse out and stuff it back in when it started honking it down again or taking it in and out for an intermittent wipe!

Lessons learned: these days the databases of stopovers are so much better than they were. They’re more up to date and have more reviews so it quickly becomes obvious if a stopover has degraded or closed, so we reckon this time we’d know if we could stay somewhere in Genoa.

Fun Drive 10: Don’t Look Down. Arghhh! I Looked Down the Col d’Allos

There’s a website called dangerousroads.org, which describes the D908 over the Col d’Allos in the French Alps as “difficult and it’s a nightmare in the wet or dark (or both)”. I can’t recall whether I read this before we headed up it, but I think I did as it seemed to say the same thing about just about every road in the Alps. In retrospect it was probably right, although ‘nightmare’ might be better described as ‘nerve-wracking’. The road is narrow, has few barriers, and twists its way up from the valley to the snow-bound pass, having you perpetually worried about where your wheels are.

Lessons learned: erm, I don’t think there are any for us. We’d checked the col was open, knew we’d need to engine-brake off the other side and at least done some research to check we could get over it. It just needed some confidence from us flat-landers that we could safely drive over it, but we’ve done a fair few mountain passes since then and this one’s fine if you take your time.

The Also Rans

Whenever we’re writing anything like this, there are always a bunch of incidents which don’t quite make the cut. Some of ’em probably should, and may have been far more frightening than we recall back through the mists of time. Here are a few of them:

• The E10 road across the Lofotens. We drove this in the summer along with a million other motorhomes. The road is narrow and winding, and for some reason every oncoming moho seemed to be doing 100mph. Smashed mirrors were millimeters away, and we winced every time we were passed.
• Driving up an active volcano at Vesuvius and later up the lava-encrusted slopes of Mount Etna. This was more fear of the unknown – who knew you could drive up and sleep on a volcano?
• The Ansó Valley in the Spanish Pyrenees had us elbows-in through wee tunnels and down narrow roads with armco barriers threatening to scrape down the side of the van like the claws of a steel beast.
• Driving the van onto the back of a breakdown truck! I’d expected the breakdown guys would do it but I needed to, and it wasn’t much fun either getting it on or off the sloping vehicle.
• Being forced over the Col du Chat when the tunnel under the mountain was closed, and finding ourselves face to face with a full-sized coach…

And Finally, Drives Which Turned out Tame

Like the Marrakesh drive above, a number of drives turned out to be far less frightening than expected in advance, including:

• Driving to the campsite a few miles from the centre of Paris (best to avoid rush hour through)
• Heading to guarded parking in the centre of Barcelona when we couldn’t take Charlie on the bus (sadly this parking seems to be unavailable now)
• Bouncing along to the city sosta by the Fiat factory in Turin
• Driving into Berlin to the city stellplatz (there’s a city theme developing here…)
• And quickly away from cities, the drive to Ksar Ghilane in Tunisia, which wasn’t all that tame thinking about it
• The Transfăgărășan mountain road in Romania. Spectacular but easily passable in a motorhome.
• As I recall the Gorges du Verdon scared us silly until we actually drove it.
• The Trollstigen (Troll’s Ladder) in Norway, again a cracking drive but nice and safe.

Right-o, best stop there or I’ll be going on about this for ever! Tell us about your scary moments – we all love a good story we can learn something from to keep us all that bit safer while we’re out there having adventures!

Cheers, Jay

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