Two weeks left and the long goodbyes

I’m sat writing this with a hangover after having a big night out with the other dads from the street where we have lived for the last 5 years. This was a much bigger night out than normal as it’s now only 2 weeks until we head off for a year in Lightning our motorhome and I think they wanted to make sure I had enough beer to last me whilst I’m away!

We truly have some great neighbours here and I feel even in suburbia we have managed to help really build a sense of community by organising street sports days, offering baby sitting for each other and having plenty of mums and dads nights out. It has taken a lot of time and effort to create such a sense of community but I think this is possible wherever you are and by doing so it can make a huge difference to not only your own wellbeing but those around you.

The last few months have all been about the preparations for our adventure – decorating, finding a nice family to look after our home, cutting down my web development work whilst finding others to help me take on some of this, handling the wobbles from the kids when they worry they are going to miss their friends too much etc. However with only two weeks to go now we are finally starting to look forward and all getting excited 🙂

The Rough Plan

We are heading off to Scotland first on a test ‘holiday’ and are planing to stay next to two attractions I have wanted to see for years – The Kelpies and The Falkirk Wheel.

We then head further North to house / pet sit for a week in a lovely house that is on a Christmas tree farm and after that we are off to see if we can find the Loch Ness monster 🙂

We might also try and make it to The Isle of Skye however this is all pretty flexible as we don’t want to plan too much ahead and plan the ‘fun’ out of things. However there are certain things we want to have pre booked and to aim for such as the first few camp sites in the Netherlands in May and activities such as a Bear Grylls Survival Academy our eldest is going to go to in Germany in August!

Between now and that camp in August we plan to get the ferry over to the Netherlands in early May, then spend a few weeks moving around there before heading into north Germany. We are then heading North again into Denmark where we are seeing a friend my wife grew up with who now works for Lego and is going to organise some passes for us all at Legoland 🙂 We then plan to get a ferry up into Norway and will head up to and drive over the Atlantic Ocean Road which is another of those things I have always wanted to do.

From there we are going to head over into Sweden before coming back down for the survival camp in August. We aren’t sure if we are going to go East towards Romania and down towards Croatia or West into France and head to Spain and Portugal after that but will keep you all informed via this site as we go.

At this point it would also be good to give you a virtual tour of Lightning our motorhome via the following clip of a very similar one someone posted from a motorhome show several years ago.

As you will see although this will be considered ‘small’ by a lot of people for a family of 5 (and a Jack Russell) to live and home school in for 12 months it seems the perfect size for us all and we are looking forward to heading off in it very soon.