Summary

Like idiots we forgot to check the mileage before leaving the UK but this Google Map suggests 1845 miles without any side trips. It's an underestimate anyway as we took non-motorway roads ifor most of France and all of Switzerland and although I've tried to replicate that the map isn't totally accurate of our route.

The route with campsite stops

The R20 performed brilliantly, apart from a minor problem that the driver's electric window wouldn't always wind down (an annoyance at immigration) it was perfect. Not having the exact milage I don't have the total mpg figures but the run from Friedrichshafen to Gulpen was 385 miles according to Tomtom. We probably added an extra 25 miles to that with detours and searching for a campsite, yet the fill-up next day in Gulpen was 38.2 litres giving marginally in excess of 10 mpl or 45.5mpg.

We've already added a longer a longer power cable, and found better pots and pans than our previous sets so that's two improvements for next trip. Apart from a Quick Tent replacement that has more fall and so is less water retentive we can think of nothing else we need to change.

Our van routine is well organised and we can go from bed to seating in under 5 minutes, including compression-strapping the bedding and stowing in the luton. Liz cooked most nights and although the food was fairly basic it was always excellent and little washing up to do.

Our product endorsements for the trip:

Aeropress coffee maker - I've sung its praises in the Smallmotorhomes forum and don't hesitate to do so again. Expresso coffee with no mess and no cleaning. It really does make great coffee and is much easier than a a cafetiere or an aluminium stove-top such as a Bialetti. It's a genius piece of design and doesn't even need washing out afterwards as there are no residual grounds left in the device - a quick wipe with kitchen roll after use sufficed until we got home.

Lifeadventure Trek Towels - not the normal smooth microfibre towels, these ones are slightly rough but have amazing drying qualities, dry themselves quickly in the sun and pack away into baks small enough to hang inside the van. We have two bath size ones, must get a face one.

Onechem concentrate toilet fluid - although we restricted the use of the chemical toilet to liquid waste, regular emptyings were necessary and, of course, a toilet fluid to ensure sanitaryness was essential. The Onechem concentrate comes in a bottle that appears to have been designed especially to fit upright in the R20's external locker. Being a concentrate only 20cl are needed so the small bottle easily lasted the trip. The cool bit is that it has a cunning mechanism so that squeezing the bottle allows fluid to climb up a tube into a small measuring reservoir at the top of the bottle so it's a cinch to measure out the exact quantity and pour into the waiting loo.

Boil in the Bag food - Liz took some rice with us but also found wheat in France and Switzerland. Made life much easier and reduced washing up time. We are currently investigating whether we can get boil in the bags to make our own up - Lakeland Plastics sell them but for rice and grain we will need perforated ones which are hard to find.


A lesson learned - blogging takes much more time than you would expect. If you plan to do a daily diary you must do it daily. Even the simple chore of taking all the photos from the camera, selecting ones for the blog and then cropping and resizing takes much longer than you might think.

The Dutch Mountains

The terracing can just be made out, perhaps.

Gulpen, is in Limburg and the area known as the Dutch Mountains because of the slight hills that discriminate this area from the rest of this dead-flat country. The Osebos campsite is actually terraced to take the small slope into account.

It's hot, 30°C, and a good plan might be to catch the bus into Gulpen and slowly consume some of that beer for which the town's brewery is famous. However the campsite reception had leaflets from 3 different camping shops within a few miles of here, all of which looked large. So it's shopping time.


The first shop was excellent and gave us several ideas but we went on to the second and then the huge one in Brunssum. This was by far the biggest outdoor shop we've seen, easily dwarfing the local Go Outdoors here in Southampton. Yet, somehow it lacked the Aladdins Cave quality of the shop in Margraten. Still €12.99 for a 10m power lead was good - we discovered the 15m one we already have was a bit short for some sites so now we have 25m capability. A few other bits and time to rush back to Gulpen for a quick cuppa and tidy-up before heading back to a few miles from here to meet our friends in Landgraaf.

A lovely evening - thanks Chantal for the excellent home cooked Indonesian food. It was great to meet up again. We'd met Chantal last September when running an amateur radio station from Sumburgh lighthouse on Shetland but hadn't seen Jos since he accompanied Chantal on the radio expedition to the Falklands a couple of years ago. Great company and really nice to meet their children Jens and Runa (is that correct?). In fact the company was so good that we left it until the very last minute and it was a race against time to get back to the campsite before curfew at 10pm. We made it with a couple of minutes to spare!

Last day

Yesterday was hot but today the forecast is for 37°C. Good job we decided on air con in the van. It's 180 miles, forecast at 3½ hours from here to Calais and we have plenty of time.

So firstly into Gulpen to pick up a card for Jens who's 13 tomorrow. A shock at the Post Office where we are informed that stamps come in sheets of 10, so postage costs considerably more than the card. Then back to Margraten to by those essentials we saw cheap yesterday: a new bread knife, oursi s blunt, tent pole to hack together a better quick tent, a window box and a few other bits'n'bobs.

I had a horrible feeling about the Brussels ring road and hoped it would be nowhere near as stationary as its counterpart in Antwerp. Road works nearly confirmed my worst fears with us being almost immobile for over 30 mins, with the temperature gauge rising to 90+ as the baking heat outside gives the radiator little chance to cool. For some reason, Tomtom live services hadn't pre-warned us of this delay otherwise I'm sure we would have been rerouted.

It's hot, it's sultry, it's thunderstorm weather and approaching Calais the familiar lightening zags are already illuminating the sky. Theres still 3 hours before the ferry so we head for the Channel Tunnel area where Cité d'Europe host a huge Carrefour hypermarket. So whilst selecting our ham, cheeses and bargain wines we hear the sound of the torrential rain drumming against the store roof. It's quite some store by the sound if it but time is on our side and we can sit(shop) it out and return to the van in the dry.

We pass immigration and at French customs, being used to the Swiss border control we crawl slowly though without stopping. Mistake! A couple of douaniers pull us back and start on the 3rd degree; destinations, tobacco, contraband etc? There follows a discussion where it is obvious one wants to conduct a van search (hopefully not accompanied by the snap of latex gloves and a personal search). Fortunately his partner decides I've got an honest face and after several worrying moments we're waved through.

After all that excitement the ferry and 2 hour drive back from Dover is thankfully uneventful.

Sometimes I wish we had a bog-standard VW van conversion

Two days of Friedrichshafen was wearying on the feet and we didn't think there were enough bargains in the flea market to stay and haggle closing down prices, so Sunday morning we set off for home. A ruler drawn between Friedrichshafen and Calais would suggest setting course for Luxembourg or Metz which was our original plan. Yet both Google Maps and Tomtom suggested the fastest route would be almost directly north, up through Germany and then turn left at Aachen and head east via Brussels. So plan B, stick Luxembourg off the list of countries to visit and replace with The Netherlands and Belgium.

The reason Tomtom suggests this route is that once off the Bodensee roads we are straight into the excellent German autobahn system of good, toll-free motorways. Now me might not be capable of the speeds some of the larger Mercs and BMWs but we could trundle at 70mph+ and make the 385 miles to the campsite just outside Aachen in around the 6 hours that Tomtom suggested. Apart from 3 stops and a minor hold-up that Tomtom did her best to skirt us past we probably wouldn't have been far off that time but with the stops we have been on the road just short of 8 hours before arriving at Gulpenerburg. This site with 300 touring spaces, is  FULL, on a Sunday evening in the middle of school term. Hell!

We are hot and tired, it's been a long day and the last thing we need is a full campsite with no plan B - it seemed so huge we thought there'd be plenty of spaces. Actually the last thing we needed sitting in a hot van ( it's close to 30°C outside)  trying to find a site as close as possible, was to hear that familiar call "Zis is I nice mikro-camper, I zink". One can't be rude but now is definitely not the best time to have to conduct a tour of the Roma!

Our new guest assures us that there are lots of campsites in the area but doesn't know where any are! Great help! Then we remember that Tomtom is new and still has a live services licence. Fire it up, search for "Places close to me", "Campsite" and it comes up with Camping Osebos just a few miles down the road outside Gulpen. A hasty journey, over several single track roads soon gets us to the main Gulpen road and onto the campsite.

Once the van is parked it is definitely beer-o-clock! Been a long day.

Campsite Photos

Space was a a premium, so some had to camp atop their car

Or half over the pavement

An interesting mag-loop

That's quite some capacitor

Campsite craic

On of the highlights of the hamfest for us was staying on the campsite. It was as if a multinational band of gypsies had coalesced for a weekend.

The Romahome was the object of interest to almost everyone. Everytime we looked out of the window someone was looking at it or pointing to it. I've lost count of the number of tours we've given over the long weekend. I think someone needs to put together a Romahome phrasebook with phrases such as:

• "The seats pull together and make a huge double bed"
• "Notice how the sink cunningly lifts up to reveal the toilet compartment" 
• etc.

translated into many different languages. Even on our trip to the local supermarket did we find a couple of young Polish amateurs photographing the van as we returned. Another impromptu tour.

The weißen was sehr gut

The campsite had a couple of  amenities - a small food bar and, of course, a beer bar. Soon we had extended our UK contact list beyond Norman GI4ZSP to Dave GW4ZAR and Steve MW0ZZK as we shared a beer or two together. In fact, Dave and Steve became good friends and we bumped into them several times more over lunch food sessions and evening bar excursions. Another group of regulars at the bar was a Dutch DX group whose excellent English meant we become an international drinking group. The beer was good too,  a weißen and a märzen to choose from, at €4 per ½ litre. On Saturday evening we spent a long evening in the company of these good friends and Sunday morning we were both not at our best. It was then that I discovered the märzen we had been drinking was a hefty 5.6% by volume!

We never tried the food on the campsite. It was typical German fastfood but the Dutch amateurs reckoned the "Fricadella" was most interesting - I got the impression that this was not an entirely complimentary statement!

As well as the fixed vendors an excellent (and amazingly cheap) Italian ice-cream vendor toured the site regularly and most evenings a small van would have freshly picked cherries for sale. Liz bought some but declined the offer of local fruit schnapps!

A quiet time on the campsite

We made several tours of the site, noting people's ingenuity particularly concerning antennas. Everyone was friendly and helpful and only too keen to discuss, as best as our non-existent German would allow, the design decisions behind their variation on a ¼wave vertical or inverted-L fishing rod antenna., which seemed to be the norm. In fact it was an early tour of the site that lead us to discover the CG brand of auto-ATU and a subsequent internet lookup that convinced us that one was worth buying (it was gratifying to see that the Italian equivalent of RAYNET used them too).

Certainly if we were to go a subsequent year, and we do plan to, then staying on the campsite is a must. Yeah, there were queues for the loos and shower (although Liz didn't have a problem) but the good natured environment made it a real part of the hamfest experience. For example, the Macadonian contingency opposite usually had national music playing in the background and would occasionally, spontaneously burst into a chorus or two of one some folk song. Most enjoyable.

Hamfest 2011 - organisation

Messe was busy but not overcrowded. The 3 halls did take a good, tiring day to get round and occasionally it was a squeeze to see things but nothing like the UK rallies. Everything was well spaced and easy to find. The main hall which housed the traders also housed many of the national radio bodies, so as well as our own RSGB stand we chatted with the Italian national society (free Prosecco), the Dutch VERON (free liquorice), the Council of Europe radio society (chocolates and a very interesting chat), the Italian equivalent of RAYNET (excellent ideas for emergency and portable stations) as well as browsing many of the others.

Catering was amazing given the number of people. Food was typical German - Wurst, Pork Knuckles, Chicken etc. and of couse the mandatory beer to wash it down. Queues weren't too bad and even at peak times we were able to get food within 5 mins or so and find a table. Even more surprising the prices didn't rip us off - even the beer was little more than UK pub price although the concept of a deposit on the glass was unusual.

There wasn't even a queue for the loos!