Ten Years of the OurTour Motorhome Blog!

Happy birthday OurTour, our baby motorhome blog is a decade old! Where did the time go? Come with us as we take a ride back through the mists of time, revisiting the highs and lows of our lives during what’s been an epic ten years for us.

Ten Years of Motorhome Blog Writing

When we were dreaming about a motorhome tour of Europe back in 2010, we poured over blog posts from Europe by Camper and The World is Our Lobster, pretty much the only two motorhome blogs available at the time. We loved the sensation of freedom they conveyed, and were taken aback by the quality of the writing and photography. Although we’d done plenty of writing for work, we’d never tried blogging about our lives, and we knew we couldn’t match what those two blogs had done, but we opted to give it a go anyway.

Our very first post wasn’t exactly mind-blowing, a one-liner: “Bear with us guys, we’re just moving the website to a new system…”. The subsequent early posts were all tentative and fumbling, popping up a photo and a bit of text, just keeping our friends and family up to date. We had no idea how we wanted to express ourselves or know if anyone might be interested to hear about our plans for a trip of a lifetime; a year-long tour of Europe in a motorhome.

We posted as we sold our campervan, quit our well-paid jobs and bought a 20 year-old Hymer B544 we dubbed ‘Dave’, fitted a solar panel, additional door lock and crutch-powered bike rack, painted the wheels and LPG tank, sold our stuff, sank the remains of our drinks cabinet in a blow-out leaving party, rented the house out, weighed the van and, one overcast day in October, finally set off south heading for Dover. Within a couple of days, on our way south through England, we’d first discovered the fridge didn’t work, resulting in a frenzied bacon-sandwich-athon, and then ripped off the main skylight on the M25 by not winding it down fully before finally making it to Dover. Not an auspicious start, but it got us quickly into the mindset of fixing stuff abroad and eating foreign food!

As we crossed the channel the very limited content we wrote on each post was driven by internet access, which was still expensive or awkward to access abroad. We could use the internet with our mobile phone, but only had 25MB a day to use (roughly the size of this web page), so relied heavily on finding free and paid WiFi networks, or buying a SIM card in a country where we planned to stay for a few weeks. Often we’d write a post with just text, upload it with our phone, and then add the photos when we could find WiFi at a campsite, McDonalds or a cafe. Over the past decade mobile internet has grown gradually cheaper and more widespread and today we have the unbelievable option of unlimited 4G internet using a roof-mounted antenna, with access practically everywhere for £20 a month, and can sit and watch streaming UK TV, even high in the Alps. These days it’s possible to run a blog or internet business from a motorhome right across Europe.

As for our ramblings, well over time we grew more confident and we started to write longer posts and tried to convey our feelings in them. The number of people reading the blog increased from a monthly count of 107 mates, colleagues and family in May 2011, building up to 1,707 people a month by December of that year. By the time we came back to the UK in Sep 2012, we were getting 4,650 different people a month reading our posts. Each post was being read 300 or 400 times, wow! That encouraged us to keep going. To date we’ve had over 4 million visits and served up nearly 30 million pages, and our more popular posts are read over 5,000 times a month. Bonkers.

For the first two years we blogged every day. Quite how we found the energy, I’ve no idea, as we were moving location on average every 1.5 days too (we keep a track of all of our overnight locations on this Google Map). Although we’d freed up about 50 hours a week from working and commuting, and were high on life, so all that excess energy had to go somewhere I guess! As the years passed we’ve blogged less frequently, and I’ve even called it a day before now, but we’ve continued motorhome touring and have also opted to expand the focus of the blog a little and write more about how we’ve funded our lifestyle, so have kept the blog going as a result.

In addition to writing, we’ve published over five hundred videos on our YouTube channel, and in doing so have built up a healthy respect for just just how much work is involved in planning, capturing and producing good quality video content. It really does take many hours to produce just a short video, sorting through tens or even hundreds of clips when deciding which ones to use. That doesn’t stop lots of motorhome and vanlife vloggers from putting together lots of great content, and I really enjoy watching it and feel there’s more we can do in this area, something for the future.

As our audience started to grow we wondered whether we could start to build an income from blogging. Over the years we’ve tested out various strategies, using affiliate links to products on Amazon we’ve used, hosting Google Adsense adverts, asking for sponsorship from companies we’re happy to recommend and advertising books we’ve written. These all generate small income streams which help keep us motivated to keep the blog going, but we know that we are mere amateurs at it.

There are thousands of motorhome blogs out there now, with some even getting their motorhome loaned to them for free, I kid you not (see The Grey Gappers). Don’t worry we don’t plan to fill our blog with adverts and pop-ups just to make a few extra quid, in fact we’ve already removed several adverts that annoyed us. However, it is really interesting to see how blogging has evolved over the past decade, and who knows what will happen in the next 10 years.

Ten Years of Motorhomes

Despite appearances to the contrary, we weren’t complete motorhome novices when we set off back in 2011. In earlier years, when work allowed, we’d used our Tablot Express Autosleeper Harmony panel van conversion named Harvey (the RV, of course) to enjoy holidays exploring England, Wales, Scotland and France, and one brief beer-fuelled foray into Germany and Belgium. All of this was before we started our blog, more’s the pity for us two personally if not for the wider world, as OurTour’s become a great resource as a reminder of all the fun times we’ve had in our vans.

Our time in Harvey confirmed we were a couple of big kids, revelling in the child-like sensations of living and exploring in a van, cooking in the tiny kitchen, having our pooch Charlie beside us, showering under a hot but feeble stream of water and pulling a cold beer from the fridge, all in the middle of a field, magic! Harvey also taught us what happens if you don’t take care of your leisure battery, or fail to drain down the heating system in winter, and also that, sadly, we needed something just a little bigger for longer-term van-dwelling. All the back ache and trapped fingers from making up the lumpy bed every night risked us incurring the high cost of divorce lawyers, so we opted to sell Harvey.

Our plan had been for us to head off in the summer of 2012 in a motorhome costing around £25,000, but a nervous breakdown/dummy throwing episode from me brought the timeline forwards and pulled the van budget down to around £10,000. The photos we’d taken of a lovely B class van we’d been drooling over at a dealer were quietly shelved and instead eBay served up a classic A class Hymer B544 we dubbed Dave. With over 100,000 miles on the clock and an alarmingly rusty under-chassis, we were, erm, curious (scared witless) about whether he’d survive the year.

We were right to worry, and wrong at the same time. Yep, stuff broke on Dave, the most expensive being the clutch which self-destructed after 6 months costing us €1,400 (about £1,200), but we had the time to get it fixed, and on the whole he proved an absolute warrior, putting up with abuse like this:

The one thing we got seriously wrong was the tyres. A lesson learned, particularly for me: don’t drive a lumbering van-wagon on ancient tyres. One of ours blew out in northern Spain, ripping the entire surface of the tyre off and whipping it through the wheel arch in a loud dust-cloud of an explosion. That left an impressive if unpleasant view of the road through the floor of the van and a reminder that the act of simply driving was the most dangerous element of our day-to-day touring lives. Even though I still wince at the cost of motorhome tyres, we fit decent ones these days, that blowout could have caused a serious accident, which ain’t what this is all about.

Dave carried us over mountain ranges and to the edge of deserts, over seas, into magnificent cities and besides mighty rivers. His drop-down cab bed passed the can-we-sleep-in-it-for-months? comfort test and kept the van length down to 5.5m, enabling us to easily round hair pin bends and squeeze into a wide variety of free parking spots (this is one of our favourites). His sagging leaf-spring chassis proved capable of hammering along the roughest of roads in North Africa and Ukraine (here’s an example on the headache-inducing H10 national road). We were kept warm and clean by his air and water heater and shower. Much of the time we stayed away from campsites to get the absolute most from our wonga reserves.

By the time our funds ran dry we’d done almost two years of full-time touring, both hooked on the drug of freedom and desperate to regain it as quickly as we could. Once home Dave became a casualty of a war waged on spreadsheets, sold to free up funds we could use for a house renovation.

After just a couple of years back home we’d re-engineered our finances to allow us to ‘retire’ and restart our travels (having revised down our target yearly income figure a time or two!), and we again took to eBay, buying another Hymer B544, this time a 2001 model, from a couple in their 80s who’d decided to stop touring. We spent £16,800 on the van, plus a few hundred pounds to fit a SOG unit to the loo and a refillable Gas IT LPG system. The van already had a solar panel and a couple of leisure batteries, so we didn’t need to modify the 12V system. We were gifted a roof-mounted 4G antenna from motorhomewifi.com, which we’ve used for 5 years now boosting our internet speeds across Europe and North Africa (this video shows the install process). Our new van received the name Zagan, after the town of Żagań in Poland which lies close to the location of Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp, the scene of The Great Escape.

Zagan is slightly longer than Dave was at 6m, and has two sofas for maximum lounging around and an ALKO chassis with a double floor, which means he is better insulated for cold weather adventures. Over the past six years he has taken us from the very top of Norway, all the way back to the Sahara desert in Morocco and many, many places in-between.

Zagan’s proved to be as resilient as Dave was, so we’re hooked on Hymers as a result I think, ours have been very well built. Of course stuff’s broken, and we’ve an ongoing saga with a serial wheel bearing failure which we think might be down to a small part being left out when they were first replaced in France a few years back. Other than that we have the van serviced each year and hope it’ll last us a good few more years!

We’ve condensed all the practical motorhome tips and tricks we’ve learned over the years into one place, The Motorhome Touring Handbook, the latest version’s available here from Amazon as an ebook or paperback.

Ten Years of Motorhome Touring

We’ve been lucky to be able to spend months at a time on the road in our motorhome for much of the past decade. Most of our motorhome tours are outlined on this page, and all of our overnight stopovers are on the map below (zoom in and click on any of the pins for a link to the blog post we wrote while we were there). There’s a short summary of each tour below, with some of our favourite photos under the map. We’re not the only ones doing this madcap wandering by the way, and there are a ton more maps from other motorhome travellers here.

We set off for our trip of a lifetime in October 2011 with the aim to ‘turn right at Calais’ and we just followed our nose as we went. Pet Passport rules changed while we were in Portugal, making it easier for us to take Charlie to Morocco, so we got brave and crossed the Straight of Gibraltar for a winter month in North Africa. We learned a lot about ourselves in the process, and wrote a book about how to independently go there in a motorhome when we got back. Back in Europe we headed east through Spain and France into Italy, across the Balkans and Eastern Europe before heading back to the UK in September 2012 via Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium.

After a couple of weeks in the UK we headed off again, this time turning left at Calais! We had a plan on this trip to head to Tunisia to pay our respects at Julie’s grandfather’s war grave, and travelled there slowly through Germany, Switzerland and Italy. After 6 weeks in Tunisia we headed back to Sicily and then across to mainland Italy, eventually camping on board a ferry over the Adriatic Sea to Greece for the spring and early summer. From there we headed north through Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and Poland, finally returning to the UK in September 2013.

A two year hiatus followed as we worked to replish the war chest and sort out our finances long-term, before we headed out again for a tour of France and Spain in October 2015, enjoying the pinxos of San Sebastian, the Spanish Pyrenees and the Puy de Dome before heading back via the French WW1 war graves in December 2015.

After spending Xmas at home, in January 2016 we set out again, heading down to Italy, across the Adriatic to Croatia and then relentlessly north through the Baltics into Finland (where we utterly failed to get naked in the lumberjack smoke sauna) and all the way up through the Arctic to Norway’s North Cape. After an epic ten weeks in Norway (our guide to Norway’s here) where we saw both the midnight sun and the northern lights on the same trip, we headed back home via Sweden and Denmark, arriving in Harwich in November 2016, 10 months after setting off.

Later in November 2016 we were off again to a rendez-vous with fellow motorhomers Phil and Jules. Travelling on and off in convoy we travelled through Spain and into Portugal for Xmas before heading over to Morocco for three months, where we had our most epic/stupid day’s driving ever. Back through Spain (where we did a 5 week house sit north of Malaga) and Andorra, we caught a stage of the Tour de France before returning to the UK in July 2017.

This time we stayed home for quite a few months, not leaving the UK again until April 2018. Our travelling pooch Charlie was suffering numerous ailments by this point which affect his breed and had been on various medications for years. Sadly he reached the end of his particular road in the French Alps, and to our distress was put down painlessly by a vet. I’d been training for an uphill half marathon in Switzerland, which I ran with Phil (who’d encouraged me to have a go at it) a couple of weeks later. From there we returned to France, did some fantastic zip-lining and watched more Tour de France action before heading home in July 2018.

Back in the UK Zagan came into his own as we spent a weekend at Carfest festival with fellow motorhomers Richard and Jenny who we first met in the Baltics. It was a real luxury to have our home on wheels to return to at night. In October 2018 Australian friends Rose and Paul were flying into Paris on the way home from walking the Camino de Santiago, so we headed for the city of light to meet up with them at a campsite by the Bois de Bologne, visiting Paris and the palace and gardens at Versailles before turning north again three weeks later.

We next set out in January 2019 on a snowbird run, escaping the UK’s winter by taking the EuroTunnel to France then heading to the south of France before turning east for Andalusia’s incredible Mezquita de Córdoba and returning to the UK via France at the end of March.

By May 2019 we were off again, making the most of our pre-Brexit (and pre-COVID-19 as it turned out) roaming freedom, returning to Zermatt for the half marathon (Ju) and ultra marathon (me) in the Matterhorn valley. Lots of generous blog readers sponsored us and we were delighted to raise money for the British Lung Foundation, as my Dad has COPD and gets a lot of support from them. Returning through France we took in Bastille day fireworks before crossing back to the UK for another Carfest festival, only this time the weather wasn’t so kind, resulting in Zagan having to be towed off the site by a tractor (along with about 1000 other vans)!

Later in 2019 we visited Edinburgh for a few days before taking in a section of the beautiful North Coast 500 in Scotland, finding it lovely and quiet out of season. This enabled us to free-camp in most places (leaving a donation where we could), visiting the famous sign at John-o-Groats and staying at Sango Sands campsite where we did some great coastal walking rewarding ourselves with a magnificently indulgent hot chocolate at Cocao Mountain!

Come January 2020 we were ready to avoid the cold again, and set out for Andalusia, taking the ferry across the Bay of Biscay to Santander before spending a full month at a cracking campsite in Nerja on the Costa del Sol while we trained for the Malaga half marathon. The news was starting to report the COVID-19 problems in China and later Italy, but we didn’t grasp what was happening right up until the last minute, visiting Jerez’s race track and the Fundador sherry bodega, the ancient sea city of Cadiz and heading further south until we we were near Tarifa, about as far south as you can get in mainland Europe. We rushed home just as Spain and France went into a state of emergency, quarantining for 14 days in the UK, during which time our home nations went into lockdown too and all travel was off the cards.

Over the summer of 2020 restrictions eased and we tentatively spent a few weeks in our van at campsites in England at Edale, Carsington Water, Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby. We find motorhome travel in Britain more expensive than on the continent, as we tend to stay on campsites when we’re here, but our budget allows for paying for sites at least some of the time and there are absolutely stunning landscapes to be had in Britain and (we’re told, we haven’t toured there yet) Ireland.

Come the autumn of 2020, we’d a difficult decision to take: do we spend the winter in the UK, knowing that new lockdowns might mean we could hardly be outside, or do we head for Spain? We made the call to head back to Nerja and stay there for 5 months, intending to come home when our Brexit Schengen allowance ran out at the end of March 2021. As COVID-19 cases rose again across Europe we travelled quickly across Spain to Nerja and settled in for the winter. Sadly we had to fly home a couple of weeks later when my mum passed away in November. We managed to fly back to Spain during a period before Xmas when travel was possible for a short while. Over the winter the UK was blasted with snow and ice, but we were lucky and enjoyed long periods of blue skies and the warmth of the sun on our skin. We were able to eat out in a very quiet Nerja and nearby Frigiliana, while Ju trained for and ran her first 20 mile run. We drove back to the UK as planned at the end of March.

If you’re looking for inspiration for the future, we’ve collated 200 of our favourite overnight motorhome stop-overs across Europe and North Africa into one book, The 200, available here as an ebook or paperback from Amazon:

Ten Years of Personal Finance

Just how have we afforded to do all this travelling in our 40s? Read on folks.

When we first set out in 2011 we’d built up a pot of savings which we slowly burned through as we travelled. I was an IT project manager and Ju worked in marketing, both employed by a multi-national corporate energy company. We’d paid off the mortgage on our home giving us an income from renting it out. We also had a small bungalow we used to live in which was also rented out, but it had a mortgage which ate up the income from it. We’d already made a big shift in mindset in the years building up to leaving for our trip, realising that if we reduce the amount we spent on holidays, gadgets, motorbikes, books, eating out, clothes, TV packages and so on, then we could crank up our savings rate well above the ‘normal’ 10%. That helped us pay off the mortgage on our house, which in turn enabled us to quickly save up enough money needed to buy Dave the motorhome and pay for our living costs for a year (which turned into two years) on the road.

While we were away we met inspirational people who’d managed to go even further than that, setting themselves targets and consistently saving high amounts of their income for years, and investing the excess money which eventually generated enough income to cover all of their living costs. They were financially free, able to travel for ever if they wanted to, well before the age they could access their pensions.

We were 41 when we came home from our first trip. The tenants in our house wanted to stay there, so we decided to rent somewhere smaller. With no jobs it was fortunate that we had kept aside enough of the rental income from our house to pay the 6 months up-front we needed to rent a house. We started to do a review of what we owned. In addition to our house and part of the bungalow, when we started rummaging through paperwork found we’d 7 pensions between us, although we couldn’t touch them for at least another 14 years. We had a big decision to make: do we go back into our old, stressful careers which paid very well, or do we find jobs we enjoy more but didn’t create as much income? After much thought we opted to make the most from the skills we had, which were still relatively up to date. Ju got another job in marketing while I started working as a freelance IT project manager. We sat down on the floor of the lounge one day and, over a few glasses of wine, worked out a way we could get financially-free before we were 50 by investing in cash-generating assets.

The low-spend lifestyle we’d enjoyed on the road continued, and our savings rate went through the roof as a result. After reading blogs like Mr Money Mustache and books like The Simple Path to Wealth (as well as loads more books and blogs), we started to slowly invest in low-cost share funds called ETFs, Exchange-Traded Funds, effectively buying a slice of thousands of the biggest companies around the world. Every 3 months these ETFs pay out dividends (sort of the equivalent to interest on cash savings) and historically have (over the long term) gradually increased in value.

Neither of us were experienced in buying share funds though, and were more comfortable with owning rental property, so we remortgaged our bungalow and combined the money with saved earnings to buy an old butcher’s shop, which had a three bedroom house attached and an outbuilding filled with meat storage and processing equipment. To save money on rent we moved in while we renovated it, something we can heartily recommend no-one else does! We got planning permission to change the outbuilding to residential use, and over the coming year we worked alongside tradesmen to strip the house, shop and outbuilding right back and fit them out again.

In August 2015 we had been living in the outbuilding (nicknamed The Cooler) for a few months when a tenant moved in to rent a room in the house. This was the tipping point, when the income from our investments would cover our outgoings without us having to go to work. We were financially free. It’s been almost six years since that day, I’ve dipped back into work for a few months as a contractor, Ju has started her own business and we’ve written and self-published a number of books, but these are all done on our own terms if and when we want to. We still have around 19 years until we reach official retirement age, by which time we’ll have probably experienced a lifetime’s worth of retirement!

The process we (and most other very early retirees) followed to get financially free is described in detail in our book The Non-Trepreneurs, available here from Amazon as an ebook or paperback.

Ten Years of Tiny Living

Our motorhome has an internal floor space of around 10m². By comparison, the average UK home is around 76m², over seven times more space. The part of our house we spend the most time in the UK, The Cooler, is about 25m², so only 1/3 the size of an average home. These small spaces are most definitely not for everyone, but somehow they’ve suited us well and in their own way have helped to set us free.

By enabling us to rent out the larger ‘normal’ sized homes we used to live in, or investing the money we’d have spent on a larger home into solar panels or share funds instead, we’ve generated an income which allows us to travel without working. By restricting the storage space we have available, they’ve helped us keep a cap on the ‘stuff we own’, and in turn the ‘stuff we buy’. They’re also relatively easy to clean, heat and maintain. Our motorhomes have been very well designed to make the absolute most of the space available, and we’ve re-used those same design ideas in The Cooler.

The COVID-19 pandemic has stress-tested our living space arrangement. We feel the small spaces have worked well for us over the previous years, as we were able to get out and about in our motorhome whenever we wanted to. This granted us fantastic access to urban and rural landscapes, a ‘world is our garden’ sensation. When the pandemic temporarily removed that option we found ourselves limited to The Cooler for months during lockdown, and three times we’ve had to isolate in here for between 10 and 17 days at a time, locked in together, something we obviously never expected to happen. Yep, we had a few moments when we’d have preferred not be locked in here, especially on the final quarantine period, but overall we were just grateful to have somewhere safe to be. Lots of full-time motorhomers found themselves in a tough position when campsites closed down and they were forced to search out one of the remaining open spots or rent a house, and we felt lucky that we didn’t have that problem.

Something else which is very clear to us about small space living: it’s far more palatable when it’s something you’re doing voluntarily. If we were forced to live in these small spaces because we’d no other option, we might feel very differently about it. It’s important in life to feel good about yourself and how you fit into the world around you. We’re happy with our choices as we know it means we’re free to spend our time doing the things we want to do. It’s also important not to declare that we’ll never ‘go back into a full-sized living space’, as we might do that one day as our outlook on life and our financial situation changes.

Ten Years of Fitness

I’ll be honest with you guys: those first couple of years on the road didn’t do much for our physical fitness! Our mental health was pumped up dramatically even in the first few weeks of being away, but all that cheap beer, ‘briks’ of Lidl wine and boxes of pain au chocolat took their toll on our bellies! OK, mainly my belly, and I did most of the drinking too as I recall. When we came home in 2013 and started working on our madcap plan to get financially-free, fitness again didn’t feature as we ploughed every ounce of energy we had into the office (during the day) and house renovation (evenings and weekends). Those two years of full-on effort to drag in as much money as possible had a seriously detrimental effect on Ju’s mental health. She’d taken a job which required her to be economical with the truth at times and she really struggled with that. Combined with the fact we were living on a building site and we doing absolutely nothing to have fun, her mental well-being hit rock bottom.

That low point is where our physical fitness started to improve, as Ju was advised to make time to do stuff she enjoyed, as it seems work, work, work isn’t good for you. She started swimming again which she used to enjoy as a child, but soon realised that swimming opportunities would be limited when we were on the road, so she ventured onto a treadmill and taught herself to run. I was impressed/amazed. In all the years I’ve known her, Ju was massively dismissive about exercising (whenever we saw someone running she’d utter under her breath: “crazy!”), and yet here she was heading out the door. A while later our motorhome buddies Phil and Jules lined up a trip to Marrakech to run the half marathon, and before we knew it we were both killing ourselves on the streets of Morocco. That was was Ju’s first 13.1 miler, but not mine, I’d run a few of them in my 20s but had never found the effort so hard as I did in Morocco. Neither of us had ‘properly’ trained, but time was coming for a change.

Quite what makes these kinds of change happen is a mystery to me, but one day some months later my mindset flipped. I was around 90Kg at the time (14s 2lb), and when I looked up my height of 5’10” on the NHS Body Mass Index calculator, it told me I was at least 10Kg overweight, and was edging towards obesity. The website warned me I was at increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke. I was having some issues controlling my anxiety levels at the time, plus my mate Phil had just booked to run an uphill half marathon in the Swiss Alps in about 8 months. The perfect storm maybe – the temptation of a big hairy challenge and the pointy stick of impending health issues and that was that: the thin-a-thon commenced.

A paper chart went up on the wall whether we were in the Cooler or in the van, and we kept a graph of our weights each Monday morning. I joined the local gym and started using the indoor rowing machine to do low-impact exercise to help get some weight off my joints, and later started running. The charts showed our weights both falling gradually week-on-week, with a few bobble back up here and there. By the time of the half marathon in Zermatt I was down to 75Kg, inside the NHS ‘healthy weight’ range, and feeling very good.

Since then physical fitness has remained a priority for us both and although our weights have bounced about it a bit, we’ve kept well inside our healthy ranges. We’ve joined our local running club which not only brings a great community of like-minded folks, but also it means you are never short of company for a run. Over the years we’ve had the opportunity to run in some incredible places with some inspirational people and have completed a number of challenges. I’ve finished a few ultra marathons, and Ju’s recently run her first 20 miler. We’ve also shifted to a healthier diet with less meat, and I’ve been alchohol-free for the past two and a half years (Ju’s always had a healthier relationship with drink than me, and continues to enjoy the odd glass of prosecco!).

The Next Ten Years

What will the next decade bring for us? We don’t know, of course. When we lost Charlie in 2018 our thinking was we’d do more travelling further afield, and even got our jabs ready to head to Sri Lanka at one point, but we never made it, preferring to stick to what we knew best perhaps.

Brexit and COVID-19 pandemic have obviously had a big effect over the past year, and we guess the pandemic will continue to restrict travel to some destinations across the world for the next year or two. Along with these big external factors, we’ve internal drivers too which will affect what we do in the coming years. Since we retired our biggest life challenge (so far) has been working out what to do with the enormous expanse of time we freed up from commuting and sitting behind desks. It’s a great problem to have, of course, but a challenging one nevertheless. Exactly who do we want to be in our 50s? What do we want to achieve? Where do we want to find ourselves as we approach traditional retirement age? What will make us happy and fulfilled?

I can’t even speculate on these big questions, as I really have no idea what the answers to them are. Pop back in a decade and maybe our blog will still be going when we’re all exploring in driverless electric motorhomes? Who knows?

Cheers, thanks for reading and sticking with us all these years guys, Jay and Ju

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