More tales from the road as our client tours Europe in his Blucamp Sky 20

January 5, 2018

“We will soon begin my fourth trip to Europe in as many years.

We are lucky, living the dream. Anywhere between Four to six months in Europe each year.

Travelling at our own pace, discovering lifestyles in little-known towns and villages in far-away countries, and soaking each day in a new and different cultural bath. Yes, wandering all over Europe. Not trying to keep up with someone else’s timetable. Stopping to smell whichever roses tickle our nostrils for as short or as long as we choose.

How can we do that? It took me a long time to work out how.

I persisted in my search for how because I became committed to the vision. The dream had to become a plan.

During my working life, I hoped for a fulfilling retirement, with a lifestyle allowing me to travel the world. Not just to those big cities featured in glossy tour brochures, but to visit faraway towns and villages, to discover how ordinary people live work and play in cultures and environments that are foreign to me. To get beyond the sightseeing trek, ticking off a bucket list of catalogued attractions on a shiny leaflet, and to gain some understanding of how and why people live the way they do. In my homeland, life is moulded on just two centuries of Australian history. My high school teachers had painted a mental picture of European life shaped over several millennia coloured by a smorgasbord of languages, a kaleidoscope of ethnicities, and diverse social progression reflecting regional history yielding differing cultural mindsets.

Some years back, on a trip to the USA, we discovered the joys and delights of motorhome travel. In a motorhome, we found that we can have most of the comforts and conveniences of home in a compact space. Modern motorhomes have much more than a bed and dinette. The word ‘Home’ is no exaggeration.

While it’s not fair to say US motorhomes (RV as they say it) are big, they are humungous, European mobile homes are better. In motor-homing, size is not everything. Those American tanks have lots of space but would be too big on European streets and are too dependent on that antiquated power supply called ‘mains electricity’. It’s a concept from an ancient past, where the caravan pulls up in a camp-ground to plug into a power supply linked to a long series of electrical cables reticulating this mains electricity stuff from a distant power generator. Poor old yanks are stuck with electricity because everything is automated to be driven by anything other than a person; for instance, a Winnebago side awning is wound out by an electric motor at the press of a button, while in a European motorhome, we wind a handle. Electricity is expensive and you are shackled to chaining up in a campground at night, like a prisoner on day release returning from a days labour. How backward is that? And the jaundiced thinking lures English and Australians to drag their tug along toys (aka caravan), like a ball and chain.

Then I learned more about European motorhomes, reputed to be much better built than those big yank tanks and at the forefront of available technology.

Europeans understand the word ‘freedom’. No that’s not putting it correctly. Europeans internalise the notion of freedom in their camping.

European motorhomes (wohnmobile in Germany, camping car in France, caravana de motor in Spain) use technology better to deliver the same sort of 21st century convenience as we have at home with the flick of a switch or mixer tap. European patented devices such as the Secumotion full-time drive safe regulator and Gaslow refillable system allow bottled gas to be used as the main energy supply. Combine the efficiency of gas with solar panels charging 21st-century technology batteries to power refrigerator, cooker, hot water system and internal heater, lights and power points for computers, TV, satellite receiver and appliances. We have travelled for months on end without plugging into mains electricity.

So now that I knew that a modern motorhome could provide a comfortable base to explore the world in, the next question was: How do I get one in Europe?

There are plenty of dealers in Europe who would gladly sell us a motorhome at a fraction of the cost of a similar rig at home in Australia. Yes, their governments are not so greedy. But how do I get one?”

Read how Vincent d’Storyteller bought and registered a vehicle with us in his testimonial.