Day 6 and we’re having a cheat week in an amazing AirBnB near Geneva for Christmas… pre-planned so family could come out to join us but it’s the first time we’ve come up for air since we left home in Oxfordshire last Sunday.
For anyone new to our blog, our winterized project to the Alps is set to take us around multiple resorts, villages and ski areas across the coming months – living in a motorhome.
- Decided to take a sabbatical
- Decided to make it radical
- Decided to winter in the Alps
- Decided to do it in a motorhome
The plan got wildly out of hand and before we knew it, with the help of Elddis motorhomes and a whole heap of amazing people, we’d turned this harebrained idea into a fully-fledged escapade to test out some winter kit, blog and vlog as we go and generally find things for us to do to keep from killing each other in our new tiny house.
If you want to know more about how it started there’s a back catalogue of blogs that shed some light on our story so far. We were there, and now we’re here, having covered over 1000 miles – we’d like to say the journey south was uneventful but that would be telling porkies.
Leaving a few weeks later than planned, we’d allowed a chunk of time for testing everything in the moho so we knew how to use it all, to iron out any niggles and to make sure we had the right kit on board. The time got scoffed completely by snow, admin and general unpreparedness that meant we finally set sail on Sunday and boy were we about to learn the result of PPP*.
We’ve learned so much in the last week it’s almost impossible to recall it all so here’s a small selection of the most important bits.
Ten things we learned from there to here:
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- Slow is gooooood. Trains are so last season. THE best way to leave the UK for France is at 12 knots
- There’s no getting around it, Calais is a s4!t hole
- Luxemburg rocks and you’ll spend at least 16 hours talking about fuel prices and will be prepared to take a 300 mile detour just to fill up at 80p/litre #falseeconomy
- The Gendarme have a much better sense of humour than you’d imagine…. “Miss, you have a narcotics problem?” (a story for another day)
- Japanese kitchen knives really should be secured before take-off
- Half the stuff you wanted to take is still too much stuff. And not because you’ve got nowhere to put it. Because you don’t need it
- High fiving your toilet activities becomes a thing
- Evian mineral water is more expensive in Evian than it is anywhere else in the world
- There’s no his and hers anymore, it’s just whatever you can put your hands on
- If you want an instant community, get a motorhome. A boiling pot of people from all walks of life.
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We’re keeping an eye on the weather over the coming days to see where we should spend New Year – the snow’s amazing all over Europe at the moment so really we’ve got our pick of the mountains. If anyone has any recommendations, we’ll take all the advice we can get. Please leave a comment below!
Information updates on Les Gets and Praz de Lys are updating daily – please contact us if you’ve got anything we can add to the site!
*piddly-poor-preparation…
