{"id":40135,"date":"2021-05-15T02:56:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-15T01:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ourtour.co.uk\/home\/?p=40135"},"modified":"2021-08-18T11:35:00","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T10:35:00","slug":"ten-years-of-the-ourtour-motorhome-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ourtour.co.uk\/home\/ten-years-of-the-ourtour-motorhome-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Years of the OurTour Motorhome Blog!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Julie
Us two in Skegness, ten years after starting the OurTour blog, April 2021 (blog post here<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Ten Years of Motorhome Blog Writing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When we were dreaming about a motorhome tour of Europe back in 2010, we poured over blog posts from Europe by Camper<\/a> and The World is Our Lobster<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/a>
The World is Our Lobster, Blog of an Epic 3-Year, Every Country in Europe Motorhome Tour (visit the blog<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Our very first post<\/a> wasn’t exactly mind-blowing, a one-liner: “Bear with us guys, we\u2019re just moving the website to a new system\u2026”. 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

\"Ourtour's<\/a>
Nervously waiting for the ferry at Dover at the start of our first two-year motorhome tour<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>, with access practically everywhere for \u00a320 a month<\/a>, and can sit and watch streaming UK TV, even high in the Alps<\/a>. These days it’s possible to run a blog or internet business from a motorhome right across Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Jay<\/a>
Blogging on the road in Dave<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> too (we keep a track of all of our overnight locations on this Google Map<\/a>). 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<\/a>, 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<\/a>, so have kept the blog going as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to writing, we’ve published over five hundred videos on our YouTube channel<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"OurTour<\/a>
The ourtour motorhome blog YouTube channel (visit the channel here<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>). 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Us<\/a>
Us two and Charlie ten years ago at the start of the ourtour blog<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Ten Years of Motorhomes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Harvey,<\/a>
Our campervan at Fionnphort, Isle of Mull, Scotland (aka, the end of the world, a wonderful spot)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our plan had been for us to head off in the summer of 2012 in a motorhome costing around \u00a325,000, but a nervous breakdown\/dummy throwing episode from me brought the timeline forwards and pulled the van budget down to around \u00a310,000. 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Ourtour's<\/a>
And we’re off! Parked outside our house at the start of a decade’s motorhome touring.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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