It’s been four days since we left home and today was the first time I got to change my clothes and have a shower. I could’ve changed my socks and underwear but general slothfulness meant I only got round to it today.  And while it’s nice to be clean, it doesn’t all smell like roses because showering in a campsite toilet block with some dude noisily shitting six feet away from me is hardly living the high life.  But it is my life for the time being, I’m currently sitting in our camper parked in a farm campsite not too far from Dover.  We’ve got a ferry crossing to France tomorrow, a few ideas on where we want to go, and a return ferry ticket in 89 days’ time. 

This trip has been a long-held ambition ever since we bought our van in 2017, a lot of life events pushed it back each year but it finally felt like the right moment had come… and here we are.  This blog is an attempt to mix a passion for photography with a one-time love of writing that withered on the vine when I started doing it for a living.  I’m travelling with my wife Kerry and our dog Chloe, who has zero passion for travel but shows enthusiasm for adventures.

Months of planning reached its peak when we locked the front door for the last time and I was besieged with worries of what might go wrong.  Just your normal OCD type thoughts like whether everything was turned off and were the doors all locked. I never turned back to check when we were five minutes down the road, so that’s a win. 

It’s taken us three days to finally creep down to Dover to try and acclimatise Chloe to life in the van and hopefully set a pattern for the rest of the trip of a couple of hours on the road and the rest of the day for leisure.  Our van is equipped for off grid camping and that’s what we did in the around the corner from the Cathedral in Lincoln and tucked into the University buildings in Cambridge.  We stayed with family in Chorley (Where I showered but couldn’t be bothered to change clothes).

So that’s it, we made it down South, next post from the continent.