Dan Newman
Before Grace starts school in September, we decided to rent a motorhome, take three months off work and travel round Europe. Let's see how we get on...Dan Amanda Grace
Travel Blog Posts
September 2nd 2005
We're on our way home and I've only got 8 minutes of internet left. We got very wet in St Gallen, headed back over the alps to Lugano and Locarno - both very beautiful, everyone should go. Then north again to Interlaken where we had been planning to spend 6 days but were diverted by the floods. Two people died just along the lake from here, a massive mudslide came through the village in the night. The Swiss are cleaning up with impressive efficiency. We went up to the rotating restautrant where they filmed On Her majesty's Secret Service, fantastic views of the Jungfrau and Eiger, and went to an outdoor museum where they've rebuilt 100 old buildings from all over Switzerland in a lovely setting, called Ballenberg. I've got 13 more pictures to add but ... read more
August 21st 2005
Blimey, we thought it rained as we crossed the mountains into Switzerland last week, but today... Solid downpour from dawn to dusk without a break. I saw a man with a beard building a big boat and pairing up animals. After Austria we drove a hellishly long way to Lake Garda, experiencing the deep joy that is Italian traffic management. They simply don't see two-hour queues as any sort of problem that might need attention, and when you finally crawl to the holdup it turns out to be... a badly parked moped. Or a tricky left turn crying out for a traffic light. Or a pedestrian crossing by an icecream shop. Mind you, Italian drivers don't help. I'm not exaggerating when I say we saw an accident every single time we drove on Italian motorways. Anyway ... read more
August 13th 2005
From 34 degrees on the coast to 10 degrees in the mountains... We had the heating on for two nights and Grace caught a cold. Hope Lake Garda is better. We drove over the Grossglockner Hochaplenstrasse, 40km of twisting hairpins rising to 2500metres with fantastic views of snowcapped mountains and fat tourists photographing each other. Standard procedure upon seeing a fantastic sight: one person turns their back on it and smiles, the other peers through a 1cm window at the view to make sure it is largely obscured by the first person. Press button and leave. Austria is completely spotless, someone must come out at night and brush the grass. The churchyard here in St Johann has a bike rack, a vending machine for candles and three recycling bins by the entrance. Cows with bells on, ... read more
August 7th 2005
First, thanks for everyone who's commented on the website, I only just realized how I could read your contributions - its nice to hear from you all! After Trogir we headed north up the coast of Croatia and stopped on an island called Vir, planning to stop just for a night. But then Bad news - a scratch on Grace's leg got infected, so we went to the pharmacy, who called the doctor and told us to see her, who gave us a prescription after hanging about for two hours, so back to the pharmacy, and then we had to stay another night to visit the doctor again. Lot of hanging about in a, to be blunt, craphole... it's like the wild west, full of Hungarians building horrible holiday homes so it all looks like a ... read more
July 24th 2005
Croatia may seem like a pretty cutting edge destination for Brits, but for the whole of Eastern Europe, it's Spain - somewhere hot by the sea where the food's not too weird and they sort of understand what you're saying. Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes and East Germans come here in their tens of thousands to drink beer, eat chips and meat and get sunburnt. It's just like holidays in the old days - people fall asleep drunk on the first day, get burnt, go and do it all again the next day. And don't care. This is their two weeks in the sun... The East European women are all slim, tall and beautiful; the men look like recently demobbed squaddies (and most actually are), fit, shaven, hard as nails. Until they get middle aged, when ... read more
July 18th 2005
Or, at the very least, get mown down by a moped ridden by a family of four, all on mobile phones. Tuscany was everything you might expect, winding roads, vines and olives, beautiful farmhouses owned by German industrialists, French politicians and posh English novelists. We saw three quaint fortified towns perched on a rocky outcrop in one day (Pienza, Montepulciano and another which escapes me - they all blur together). San Gimignano is beautiful but they hate campervans and wanted us to park two miles away in a coach yard, which soured us somewhat. The drive down to the Bay of Naples was long but never dull - there's always something happening on an Italian motorway. I saw a conman doing the one with a pea and three little bells at a service station, ripping off ... read more
July 3rd 2005
These got resorted into alphabetical order, but you get a flavour of where we've been so far. Many thanks to Spiff for bringing these back to Blighty on his iPod and uploading them for me (ain't technology wonderful? 'Setting off' is, er, just as we left. 'Assiette de fruits de mer' and 'first beach' are on the Ile de Re, near La Rochelle. The Gorge du Kakouette is in the Pyrenees. Camping Castellane is in the Verdon, Alpes-Maritime, France. Artouste lake is 2000m up a mountain at the end of a little railway. 'Suncream explosion' is what happens when you take a sealed tube 2000 metres up a mountain and open it pointing at your face. 'Not Lac du Tech' and 'Eolo Tempo Kite Festival' are in the Pyrenees, as are 'Camping Pyrenees Natura' (our best ... read more
June 28th 2005
I'm well aware England is sweltering at the moment, but so are we - and we're sleeping in a van that sits in the sun all day. Plus the mosquitoes are huge and greedy here in Lake Maggiore, I have a nice set of red lumps running up the side of my face. The Pyrenees were beautiful, we saw a local kite festival that was a lot of fun, drove through Lourdes which was a total dump - like Worthing only with more walking frames - and Carcassonne which is impressive, if totally fake and full of tourists. It's a huge castlewalled town with crenellations and moats and everything, but none of it is original, it was all rebuilt in the 19th century. And it was the first place we came across lots of dumb tourists ... read more
June 17th 2005
Just a quick update on day 10 of our trip, as internet access is slow and expensive up in the Pyrenees. We spent three days on Ile de Re, near La Rochelle - beautiful and quiet at the moment but expensive and going to be rammed in the summer. Then three days on the coast north of Biarritz at a custom-built resort called Vieux Boucau with Amanda's brother Steve, who met us on his motorbike. Lazy days on the beach, except when it poured with rain. Through Biarritz and St Jean de Luz, both swanky resorts but weirdly empty at the moment, then up into the mountains. St Jean Pied-de-Port is at the start of the pilgrim trail to Santiago de Compostela, very pretty old cobbled streets. Then up over windy mountain roads full of mad ... read more
June 6th 2005
All ready for takeoff, finally. We've cleaned the house thoroughly, ready for tenants who arrive 8 hours after we leave (apart from the room packed with all our gubbins). We've packed the van until it creaks, and had a very good last curry with the neighbours. I worked until 4am last night (went to bed as the birds woke up) and delivered or posted 6 last jobs this morning (and bought some deodorant). So there's nothing left to do except make sure everyone who wanted to is receiving the alerts to this blog. Goodbye and see you all in three months!* *Unless we're seeing you somewhere in Europe, that is... read more
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