What were we thinking?! One year exploring Europe; sounds like plenty of time. Ha! Our only plan was to wait out our Schengen time first in Türkiye and the Balkans, and again in Morocco. In between we only had a vague plan and decided almost day by day where to go and whether to stay longer in a place or move on. We made a few mistakes in planning, e.g. overestimating our distance to the ferry in Marseille, which caused us to unnecessarily cut short our time in Italy. All those blank places in the middle that we didn’t get to will be for next time, especially France, which we found so welcoming to motorhomes, unlike England, sadly.
The UK might break the bank, especially with the weakening dollar. We can’t return to the Schengen zone — most of Europe — until mid July. In the meantime we’d like to be someplace warm. It seems we’ve had The Year Without Summer except for a few weeks in Türkiye and a brief heatwave in Romania. We spent so much of the past 13 years in the tropics but this past year had us wearing holes in our wooly socks.
Still, look at that track! Twenty-six countries in one year. (For reference, we spent six months each in Scotland and Ireland alone.) Every mile was driven by Jack. And remember, he was driving a right hand drive vehicle on the right side of the road. Yesterday he drove onto the ferry in St. Malo on the right, and when we docked in Portsmouth he drove off on the left. Never a wrong move by my hero!
We don’t know what the coming year has in store for us. Like the rest of the world, and especially those of us from the US, we are on tenterhooks, adopting a wait-and-see approach. We’re aware of how fortunate we are to be able to travel, and we have our fingers crossed that we can continue to explore the world at our age-adjusted pace. There’s still so much to see.
Right now we have van maintenance to do, a safety inspection and insurance renewal to get through. After that we’d like to be someplace warm. We’d like to stay in one place for a while. We’d like to see family and friends. We’re working on it.