The Journey Begins

Hello and welcome to the first post of Claire and I’s travel blog - EuroOdyssey.

Now the title of this post is slightly misleading, as our journey has already begun. In fact as I write this, I am sitting on a ferry to France and we have already covered 1600 miles over the past 11 days.

Despite our original intentions of this trip being at a fairly relaxed pace, we have managed to do almost 1600 miles travelling as far as Findhorn in the north of Scotland and back down to Penzance, which is fairly damn close to the ass end of England.

Given the amount we have travelled in such a short space of time, I will try and keep this post succinct and just cover the highlights.

Day 1 – 25^th May - Leaving Newbury, picking up a SuperDream and sleeping in a driveway in Leeds.

After packing the last of our things into the van and donating a number of items we wouldn’t need on the trip to the local charity organisations (vacumme cleaner, dumbells), we departed Newbury around 1pm with our first destination being Lincoln in the middle of England.

Outside Blueberry Court Newbury just before hitting the road.

Not known for being a particularly exciting holiday destination, we were actually there to pick up a 1980 Honda 250 SuperDream that we had purchased a couple of weeks earlier on eBay.

Due to the size of our campervan (now affectionately known as Maxi) and its thirst for diesel, the bike will serve as another mode of transport around towns/cities we stay at on the way.

Getting the SuperDream into the back of Maxi

After getting the bike into the back of the van, we then headed up to Leeds to visit the wonderful Dorothy and Luke’s Mum (affectionately known as the ‘Asylum Seeking Sloth or ASS’ – more on that later).

As always, Dorothy was an amazing host for us and put on a huge feed, which was thoroughly appreciated after spending the better part of the day on UK motorways.

Our first night in Maxi was spent sleeping in Dorothy’s driveway, which was a welcome relieve from sleeping on the side of the road but came with a fairly sizeable slant, so we both woke up with fairly heavy heads.