Yep.  Back to disappointment.

You see I have to wait for my insurance documents to come through the post before I can go and get my Road Tax before I can actually drive the van off the driveway! It’s been six days!!! Come on Direct Line, seriously – send the bloody bit of paper!

Anyways readers, I have ordered around £300 worth of stuff this morning.  Hopefully all delivered between tomorrow and Monday – so I’m going to keep this post short. Otherwise I will just end up ranting about how much I dislike my insurance company!

Anyways, must go and put some more wires in for our 6 Sony XS speakers and 1200Watt Subwoofer, much fun!

Some photos from our cleaning and re-spraying days are below, enjoy!

Happy Travelling!
Overland Si

Yes – it really is worth three of them.

After a lot of research, mixed with two teaspoons of estimation and a dash of complete guessing we have forumulated our travel budget.

And our overall figure comes to…….

£6,318 (9,175 USD)

This will be split between the two of us, so is just about affordable!

The single largest part of this cost is the fuel. Our LDV van will be running on Diesel. This of course means better miles to the gallon for starters. Obviously a fair bit of economical driving skills will be needed, I am off to find some of those now. My heavy right foot is almost legendary so keeping a tight reign on that, as well as travelling far slower than the speed limits on the motorways (but faster than the trucks, otherwise they get annoyed, and they are bigger than me, and scare me…) will mean a better mpg figure.

So our fuel cost for seven and a half thousand miles is budgeted at… 1095GBP (1591USD). A good bit of guesswork went into calculating the fluctuating fuel prices. With the economic foul-up many people are choosing not to use their cars, or have no job to drive to anymore so there is less demand on fuel, meaning cheaper prices (that’s the theory anyway).

We worked out our average fuel cost to be 90pence per litre, or 1.3$ per litre. That allows for the more expensive fuel in Scandinavia and the cheaper fuel in eastern Europe.

BioDiesel

One thing that I am currently looking into is the use of Bio-Fuel. These is mostly available mixed with diesel and labelled as…. Bio-Diesel. How they came up with that name I shall never know. This is slightly cheaper than pure diesel, and is healthier to the environment or something.

Back to budgets though…

Daily Living Costs.

We have given ourselves an average of 15GBP for accomodation / camping pitches per night. Using wild camping in Scandinavia is free and fairly safe in comparisson to Eastern Europe where will be using only dedicated campervan parking places or anywhere that is guarded. Tales of campervanners being robbed at night in Eastern Europe are not rare.

As for food, well we have given ourselves 20GBP a day. This means that we will be able to buy some really expensive tinned food, wooo! By using the camping stove for as much as possible we will be able to keep within this budget quite easily. Buying fresh food everyday may not be possible so the traditional camping food of pasta and some tinned sauce will become part of our staple diet. Yum(!)

Activities - basically doing stuff. Well there is no point planning a trip where you do nothing. We have given ourselves 20GBP a day for touristy things. This is the only budget where we may overspend on certain days. Visiting a city will take more money than taking a hike in the countryside. My travel comapnion, Luke, has been given overall control of the budgets and will be in charge of making sure that the above theory is actually correct!

So there it is, our daily budget, excluding fuel, comes to 55GBP.

On top of that though we also have some other items to be added to the budget.

Firstly – Ferry costs. Obviously with UK being it an island we need to get our wheels across to the mainland. The return ferry trip should cost us around 100GBP, sailing with Norfolkine from Dover to Dunkirk. This is one of the longer crossings from Dover to France, but is also one of the cheapest.

Our second ferry will be from Helsinki, Finland to Tallinn Estonia. We have 100GBP in our budget for this.

Also needed is gas. Almost all of our cooking will be on our Campingaz kitchen stove. Gas bottles for this last roughly one week, a heating adapter is also available for the bottles and will probably be purchased somewhere in Europe (cheaper) to keep us warm on those cold Scandinavian nights. From previous camping trips I reckon a bottle will last us up to a week in colder climates and up to two weeks in sunnier places.

These gas bottles cost around 9GBP each to replace (hand in the empty bottle and get a new refilled one). And CampingGaz depots are available throughout Europe. I will probably be hunting down a list of places these are available from before I go so expect a post on that.

Also – a budget for clothes washing! Now this is where the generous shakes of estimation come in. We will be taking some powder with us for clothes washing, sometimes washing machines are included in the price of the campsite / hostel but more often it is about 2GBP per wash. So – we will probably smell a bit if we overspend on the budget for a few days.

And there you go. That is our budget so far. We will probably have a few “budgetary reviews” along the way to see what money is going where, but we cannot exceed out 55 GBP per day limit,  this current budget is at the far reaches of my current savings.

Is there anything you would add? Or are things a bit optimistic?

Ok, so another thing I had to check out was what it would actually cost to take my mobile abroad. I am on a contract with 3 mobile, I got a bloody good deal so didn’t really want to cancel it and pay all the money to terminate the contract early.

Neither did I want to spend a fortune making calls here there and everywhere without knowing what the charges are.

Three.co.uk

For those of you unaccustomed with European phone usage it works like this: buy a phone / sim card in one country – easy enough. Want to take it past that country’s borders? You have to have roaming added to your sim card and then of course pay for the privelege of using it outside of your “home” network. I’ll bet people living in Lichtenstein get a bit annoyed, the border is only ever 5 minutes away!

So I found all my rates from my network provider and here are my costs for usage abroad. Just another thing to add to the ever expanding “budget”.

So my rates are as follows.  For Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Italy I can recieve calls and text messages for free, becuase three have partner networks here.  It is also cheaper to call and text to others, costing just 15pence per minute / per sms.

In all the other countries I am travelling through there are no “partner networks”  so it will be 15 pence per minute to recieve a call /sms and 34 pence to make a call and 25 pence to send an sms message.

I haven’t had look at any other providers as I find my contract useful when I am at home for “normal” living”. I would suggest you have a look at other options if you are planning to travel and not keep your home contract.

Either that or go old school.  Phone cards often represent the best value for calling outisde of the country’s borders and for long ditance calls I don’t think anything can beat them.

Or you can go new school, get your parents / family or whomever you want to talk to to get skype, login at one of the millions of internet cafes and talk for free.

Lovely Jubly!

Happy Travelling

Holy what!!!!!

It is only three weeks until I set off on to sunny scandinavia and I will admit something to you all:

I have been slacking.

Completely, totally and utterly slacking. My excuse is that I reached brain melt-down point.  When I get back from travelling I will be setting up my own business venture(s).  More of that to come later though, much later.

So here I am guys and girls, back once more into the travelling ring.  I actually put my laptop down today, after creating, editing, modifying and organising everything after the move from Blogger to this funky new WordPress site.  You can see more about that here and here.

I have got news for you ladies and gentlemen. I can now officially announce that I will have a friend joining me on my travels, which may stop me from talking to myself half way round the tour, but I will still sing outrageously loudly for no reason at all.  That will never end, mwahahah.

And - I have worked out a rought budget. Then wished I didn’t.

And - I still haven’t bought a van yet, Time is indeed passing and I will have to get one soon.  Of course the economic downturn (disaster) means that I have not had as many people eager to buy my lovely Fiat Doblo as I would like.

And - I have virtually no time to convert the van, something that Rob at nomadofsoul.blogspot.com has rightly pointed out.  However my amazing carpentry skills (ok, those carpentry skills of my dad) will mean that everything will be sorted on time. Honestly, I believe that. Yes, I have been called optimistic before….. just what are you trying to say?

Pictures of the van will be post as soon as one is bought.

The travel route is already up – click here to see it.

As for me, I’m going to get an early night and then get back to travelling, stop trying to sort out too many things and deal with them one at a time.

That will be a first…..

And - while I think of it, you can get a free link (woohoo) by adding a comment to the bottom of this post (the one linked).

Happy Travelling!

A weekend break filled with Scottish bars, delicious pancakes and lunchtime soups, and some hidden side streets.

I’ve never really liked France.  So when my friend suggested a weekend in Lille I was very prepared to not like it.

I don’t really have any reason to not like France.  I suppose it all came from a holiday many years ago when we crossed the border from beautifully clean and efficient Switzerland into a rather backward looking French countryside with the old “hole in the floor” toilets, rubbish strewn everywhere and absolutely no efficiency – in fact almost everyone was sitting back, drinking wine and not doing any work.

I’m ashamed to say that I reverted into some sort of British Army Major, and started sprouting thoughts such as “who do they think they are, lazing around, not working, you should be working”!  Of course another reason I had a dislike for the French is their love of disruption.  A cleaner was sacked, so the natural course of action is to block the port of Dover, causing chaos in England and ya de ya – oooo I feel a rant coming on, but that’s not what you want.

So we left on a Friday evening after work, sailing with Norfolk from Dover to Dunkirk (the ports weren’t blocked by striking fishermen this time).  2 hours later we rolled out of the ferry and onto French terra firma, Vive la France!

Lille is only an hours drive from the port, and with the sat nav bleeting out her instructions it was fairly easy to navigate to our youth hostel.

Parking at a youth hostel is a rareity, especially in a city, but we were lucky enough that ours had a small car park round the back.

We had pre-booked our hostel through hostels international, making the check-in procedure incredibly swift and without so much as a wiff of brie we were safely unpacked in our rooms.

Being young folk in a city and in need of a good cold beer to distract reward ourselves for actually making use of a weekend we headed off towards the bars of Lille’s “Rue de Solférino” and happily plonked ourselves in the authentic French bar called “The Highlander”.

This was indeed a happy little place.  the bar had more beers on tap than any other bar I have seen and whilst my travel partner picked a rather fruity cherry larger I opted for the rather more manly 1 litre of larger! After scratching my armpits, beating my chest and uttering a few good grunts I slaughtered my large beer, thrusted my manly glass at the waitress and said “Un autre, s’il vous plaît“.

Polite and manly.  I was on a winner here.

Until of course the tiredness kicked in, and I wanted my bed.  France, and Lille in particular, are looking on the up.

Stay tuned for the next part coming soon…..

You can subscribe to this site at the top right of this page.

Just back from the marvelous French city of Lille, well worth a visit for everyone.

I have no confirmed offers, no job come the end of Feb and very little in the way of plans.

Depends on your view point but I’m quite happy to be like this!

But life must go on as they say and it is fair to also say that I mustget something done soon, otherwise I may as well condemn myself to a life of just doing nothing, again depends on your point of view….

The Plan Part 1

Find a job for April

Whether this is a travelling job or a “normal” job I definately will need a job in a few months time. Unfortunately my earlier plan of winning the lottery did not work, even when I bought 5 tickets. Lady Luck has probably seen my reputation and decided she’s better off without me.

The Plan Part 2

Find and kit out a cheap van to convert into a campervan.

Although this will come first time wise (as in from Feb to April) it is the later part of the plan. I am currently looking for any type of van between £500 and £1000, using some of my savings to kit it out with a bed and mattress and some other “essential” features.

Anyone got any suggestions or reliable vans? (European, UK vans)

Am lookin for something that isn’t too rusty and might have a bit of resale in a couple of months, bit too much to ask for? Probably – Will I ask for it anyway – Definately

Happy Travellin’
OverlandSi

Ok so today hasn’t exactly been the most amazing.

Odyssey Overland have no opportunities for me at the moment but will take file my details – They were courteous enough though so can’t complain. Would have been nearly perfect though as they are based not too far from where I am currently living.

So today, rather than wallow in misery (it was tempting trust me), I thought that I would finally get round to creating the new header that you can see above. I was rather impressed with myself hehe.

I have been using the GIMP – Graphic Image Manipulation Program, not the guy locked up in my wardrobe.

This is basically a free version of the infamous Photoshop. Yes I am aware it probably doesn’t have this feature and that feature, but hey it works for me.

The main thing I have been doing today is creating the “Stamp Effect” in Gimp. There is a tutorial of it over at this link here for any of you who are interested.

So this has now officially beome the OWB – Overland Wannabe Blog. Break out the champagne!!!! I’ll have the baby sham of course – I’m driving.

Also today I have been checking out me stats – and apparently I have some readers! Well I suppose I shall have to write something worthwhile soon. And get onto the mountain of application forms sat next to me.

Oh and while I think of it – this blog’s official soundtrack can be found here.

Cheers, Overland Wannabe
http://overlandwannabe.blogspot.com