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!

Good Evening everyone,

In my last post I was wondering what on earth Technorati is, how it works and how to increase your “authority”.

Technorati seemed to be a bit of a dark art form, with information hidden away and I didn’t really understand how it did what it did.

Well, I have found the answer.  And actually it is rather an anti-climax.  Technorati’s authority is worked out by looking at how many blogs link to you.

That’s it.

As you can tell I am a bit bemused and expected this to be a lengthy article on the inner workings of a secret internet traffic boosting bit of kit, but nope its just a link looker at-er.

One thing to note though is that it does not count comments.  So you can’t actually do anything about it unless people are linking to you in their posts.

So here’s an idea, I’m going to build a list.  Once that is done all you have to do is copy it into your own site and then add links to your favourite sites, tag them and then ask them to do the same.  This will result in more blogs linking to us through posts etc and will work well for the good of the blogging community, hurrah and all that and for my next trick I shall end all wars lol.

Ok – here’s the audience participation bit – Add a comment with your blog’s URL below and I will duly add you to the list in the hope that you will do the same… And don’t say I don’t give you nothing!

Happy Travelling!

Ok, well on my previous post I discussed the kind of things you should think about when transferring from Blogger to WordPress.

Patty Mooney commented on that post and asked:

I am curious why you decided to transfer to WordPress from Blogger? Looking back, would you do it again?

Well that will make a good post, thought I,  and so here it is.

First of all, Why set up a blog on Blogger?

I am a bit of a Google convert to be honest.  I love GMAIL, Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Connect, Google Docs etc, etc (and it really is a long list!) So it was only natural for me to set up a blog on Google’s blogging service, Blogger.

I didn’t really research into WordPress too much, at the time I set up my original blog WordPress 2.7 was just a sparkle on the motherboards at WordPress.  The older version did have loads of people recommending them, at the end of almost every post about how good WordPress there was the word “BUT”.  And then a whole load of things that WordPress was bad, slow or just confusing at doing.

So with my blogger blog set up and running, and with a boost from Blogger by being nominated at “Blogs of Note” (which resulted in over 20,000 visits) why on earth would I change?

What are the limitations of Blogger?

Now I’m not going to discuss all of them, but only the ones that were relevant to me.

First point was the ability to add pages, I wanted to have organised content so that people could easily search through, find the information they wanted more easily.  Secondly I also wanted the ability to add contact forms, places for a store (secret project coming soon!) and other ways to make more money online.

I am also a bit of a geek, well actually quite a large geek.  Having my own domain and the ability to add Plugins, Widgets and complete access to my own domain, add to that my own email domains an hey presto, that’s the geek in me fulfilled.

Also I wanted to have a professional looking site that would allow me some funky ways to access and upload to it.  having FTP access allows me to upload things much more quickly than having to wait for Blogger’s image uploader.  All of thee are things that I had to think about for travelling – time on Internet = money, even more so than when online at home.

Of course the final push came from trying out a free wordpress blog first of all.

The immense plugins library and availability of themes really tipped it for me.

I have a plugin for a contact form, a plugin for search engine optimisation, a plugin that automatically creates a sitemap, a plugin that automatically cuts posts to previews, a plugin that enhances the site search (try it, it’s load of fun) and there is also a secret plugin, if you leave a comment you will find out what it is!

And – These plugins are so easy to use!

There is no painful set up  – most of them do not require any coding skills or to even touch the website’s code!  All I need to do is download, unzip and upload the plugin into my library and WHAM, I can see it in my Plugins page on the admin area – go into it’s own settings page and that is it.

And I think that is the real beauty of WordPress.  Think of it as being the iron structure within a skyscraper, you can clad the outside however you want and also furnish the inside of the structure to make it work the way you want it and look the way you want.

Having the ability to grow and expand this site was a major factor in changing to WordPress.

Looking back, Would I do it again?

Yes – I can definitely state that I would still have moved from Blogger to WordPress.  I would of course do it differently, but then again, would I know what I know now?

I’d say to everyone to think carefully about changing your blog. I know for a fact that I got it wrong, I moved too quickly and had a far too complex template to start off with.

Have you changed your address or service or are you looking to? Or do you have any further questions, please add them to the comments below and I’ll reply to you.

Ok so on Friday I finally finished work, packed up my office and buggered offski!

(comments jump)

I took Saturday as a complete day of nothing, did some chores round the house, got my car cleaned ready for it to be sold and then had a day off from thinking about the future, because it got real pretty quick.

Today I am back – It’s not a good thing to think that I am not actually working anymore, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I am working harder than ever before in an attempt to actually become a travel writer. There you go guys and girls – my secret is out!

I have always loved writing, and even went to do Journalism at University (that’s another story for another time)

So it’s something I am keen to get back into. Next week I shall be sending of letters and emails and a whole snow storm of other applications to writing places etc to see what I can get. I will also be tracking down some of the leisure magazines, campervan mags, tenting mags and of course you guys will get the first peak as usual.

Also – and I say this with a small amount of trepidation, I will be moving this blog!!

It will be moving to a lovely new page where I have a nice layout, my own domain and the best thing of all – lovely galleries and some other funky stuff. I will let you know when this is all going on but I want to give a huge shout out to ITsimple.co.uk who have done me some remarkable favours for this to go ahead.

I hope you will all join me when the new one is created.

As usual comments are very welcome.

I cannot believe how quickly this has come.
Tomorrow is my final day at work.

I cannot wait, nor do I want to go in tomorrow. It’s a battle everyday and to be honest I want to hold up my white flag early.

(Click here to leave a comment)

Life has just become so busy recently, plans are afoot for this and that, plans that take time. Tonight I sat down with good intentions of writing a damn fine travel information post; went through the usual processes – grab a nice cold glass of Ice Tea, turn the mobile off, turn laptop on, whack on the media player, find links – then it all stopped.

And I make absolutely no apology for the post below sounding like a bloody hippy or “life coach” thing – I don’t really believe in them personally, but who knows they may be on to something.

Whilst the glorious piece of technology that is Media Player trawled through my collection of random noises that is my music folder it stumbled across a track that I hadn’t heard before. You know the ones I’m on about, you bought the compilation because you knew eighty percent of the stuff, but had only got round to playing the first of the two disks before you copied it onto the laptop and promptly bought something else.

I am listening to Beyond Time (ambient mix) by Blank and Jones. You can listen to it by clicking here.

Listen to it, close your eyes – don’t look at the screen, don’t look at anything. Picture yourself where you want to be. Take the moment of solitude before the bass kicks in to do a complete 360 shot of yourself, once the heavy bass kicks in dream of the discoveries you will make, the small things you see everyday that have made you stop and look twice. Allow yourself a little smile.

Seven Minutes and 40 seconds.

How often do any of us ever actually dedicate that amount of time to just closing our eyes and dreaming of somewhere else. And not the dreams before you fall asleep that you actually have very little control over, in this you are in control.

Seven Minutes and 40 seconds

Isn’t really that long, so why do we push ourselves continuously to be as busy as possible, cram everything in, work harder, play harder. Just stop.

For Seven minutes and forty seconds.

Don’t think about the music, don’t analyse it, don’t think about the lyrics. Just shut off.

I’m still not a hippy, I just wish that the whole world would take a day off, without insecurities or stresses most people are actually quite nice and a whole lot happier.

I hope that some of you will appreciate this. I look forward to my new life. Because I have suddenly realised that it’s not about the travel, it’s not about getting out of a job I didn’t like. I don’t know tha answer yet, but I’m going to go looking.

I realise that some people will just think that it’s because I’m “at that age”.

My question to you is this – when did you give up, when did you give in?

Think about this also for just a few minutes…

If I said to you that I want you to plan your life around me, around where I want you to be for 30 hours each week, at the times I specify – which happen to be during the day, when the sun is out, I will leave you the dark evenings though, so you can eat, have a few hours to yourself and get some sleep before you come back to do what I want you to do.

How much would you want for me to disrupt your life like that?

Back to normality, please leave a comment – even if just to say hi, it has been a pleasure meeting you.

Hey all, how are ya doing?

I’m really tired after my first day back at work after the holiday. Still – only four days to go, I think that’s the only thing that is keeping me going currently. Things aren’t exactly rosy and I have never had so many problems trying to teach people bloody simple things. Anyway – musn’t grumble (in the word of Terry Wogan!).

Four days until the real hard work begins. But this will be working for myself. Which makes it a seem so much easier.

For now though have a look below at some of my skiing photos. Some of which are wonderful sunsets, of course, you could never guess which time of day I most admire!

That’s all for now folks – will update more later!

Happy Travelling
OverlandSi

Hello to all you readers. I now have nearly three hundred followers (stalkers), which is brilliant.  I haven’t bee able to look at all of your blogs because the connection whilst I am here in Germany is not the fastest and online time is limited, mainly by my Facebook obsessed sister!

Please leave a commnent and I will check out your blog as well.

In our brilliant little stellplatz there are many, many campervans. A lot of them are coachbuilt wagons that are incredibly expensive.  Unfortunately my budget will not stretch to any of these travelling mansions.

There are also a number of van conversions here.  Most of them are, of course, Mercedes Sprinters or Volkswagen Crafters and Transporters.

All of these types of wagons are brilliant for converting into campervans. Below are a few things that you may want to think about before converting choosing or converting your own van. I have noted a few of these points before in my post talking about travelling Europe and Scandinavia in a Van – Link here

When choosing a van ask yourself these questions.

Do you want to have a van that you can stand up in?

Having somewhere to stand up whilst getting changed or just moving about can make a huge difference.  If you do buy a hi-roof van then make sure you check for water ingress at the connection between the van and the roof.

Think about where you will be travelling, If you will be travelling a lot into towns and cities then bear in mind that you may not be abe to get in a lot of car-parks due to the height.  I would always recommend taking public transport into major cities though.  Much easier and usually works out cheaper.

How big do you want the van to be?

This will affect your design, think about how many people are travelling with you and what you will be taking with you.  Also bear in mind the extra costs that you will incurr if your travel plans include any ferries, most of them will charge by the metre.

Van widths vary between manufacturer, with the Mercedes Sprinter being narrow but long whereas the Fiat Ducato is short but wide. The LDV Convoy is long, wide and tall.  Making it a perfect choice for conversion in this respect. You may not be able to get down every county lane in a wider van, but fold your wing mirrors and hope for the best!

Weight

Anybody who passed their driving test after 1997 in the UK is unable to drive any vehicle over 3.5tonnes gross vehicle weight (GVW).  (I am not sure how this translates for other countries, if anyone would let me know I will be grateful.) Make sure you check before you buy the vehicle that you can actually drive it!

A lot of Mercedes Sprinters and VW Crafters are 5.5t rated, having them down-plated to 3.5t is a hassle that you could avoid by buying the right van in the first place.

Also make sure you take the weight into consideration when converting the van.  The van must never weigh more than its stated weight, even when full of people, packing and food.

Also if you plan to visit Austria or Switzerland then note that your Vignette (compulsory road tax for all) will be more expensive ifyou are over 3.5tonnes.

Is speed something that concerns you?

If it is, then you may want to look at the Mercedes Sprinter – it is a beast.  Unfortunately the more powerful vans usually means a more expensive insurance policy and less economy therefore more money spent on fuel.  Speaking of fuel – go for the Diesels everytime, try to get a turbo charged one, they have good enough power and reasonable economy.

Tomorrow I will be posting a list of all the vans I have looked through and considered.

Fameseekers can post a comment here!

Ok, so I promised you a post on car / van insurance for Europe and here it is!

Please remember that this is only my own findings, if you have been told something different to what I have written here then please let me know – It might be something I have missed out on!

Travelling Abroad

Two Europes

Again though be careful of which countries you want to visit. “Old Europe” will cost you less whereas the “New Europe” countries will cost you more.

As usual please post any questions in the comments and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible.

Happy Travelling
Overland Si