Behind the Scenes: Planning Our European Campervan Road Trip

Behind the Scenes: Planning Our European Campervan Road Trip

hi where’re Richard and Jackie from early retirement wonderlust we are so excited we’re getting ready for our six week European road trip that’s coming up and we do get asked quite a lot how do we actually book and plan what we’re going to do when we’re out on our road trips so we thought we’d have a go at explaining the process [Music] so it might not really come as a surprise that when we first got our camper van six years ago our first long-distance road trip around Europe was planned with absolute military Precision we at that stage were really risk averse and we wanted to make sure that we had every night booked and we knew exactly where we were going and it really was a Whistle Stop tour of Europe and as a consequence we think that we sort of missed out on a lot of things because we stuck to the program we continued moving on and we found some beautiful places that we really didn’t have enough time to explore I think at that point as well we were both teachers and we were traveling at high season so we were very worried that if we didn’t have everything booked we wouldn’t be able to stay anywhere because it would all be fully bought at the other end of the scale we have had a trip just after lockdown where we went out for hopefully 3 weeks we did end up having to come back a bit earlier than that um and we had no plans at all and we found that we were doing a bit of a scaton approach to where we were going we would spend three nights here and then we’d drive right to the other side of the Swiss elps and spend two nights there and then we’d want to go down to an Italian Lake and spend a couple of days and before we knew it we had driven so far and used so much petrol in the van and didn’t actually have many night wherever we staying so we want a bit of a happy medium this time so for this trip we thought we would try and take the best from both ends of the spectrum we want a little bit of planning to make sure that we hit the places that we want to go to and that we give a due amount of time and that we embrace our Newfound love of slow travel but we also want to make sure that we are covering everything that we want to do over the course of the six weeks and doing it in a budget friendly way as we possibly can so at the moment all we have is our return fairies books uh on the dates that we know that we want to go and a rough idea of the countries that we would like to visit and a couple of destinations within there so in this video what we want to try and do is somehow break down our rather shambolic step-by-step approach and to try the system works for us and what we want to try and do is explain to you as to how we prioritize what we do and where we’re planning on going and how we’ve planned this whole trip out the first thing we do when we are planning our big road trips is to think about the immovables the things that cannot change so we have to be back for all the best reasons because Luke and Charlotte are having a engagement party so we would absolutely want to be back for that and we have got our feries booked so they can’t change and we have planned that we have got 44 days away so those are the absolute immovables of our trip the next thing that we had to think about is the key destinations that we want to visit and where we would like to be at our furthest point away so that we can kind of plan a a rough route on how to get there with the places that we want to go and in this case that is somewhere on the coast below Kirk in Croatia and then we want to go across to and I think you pronounce it the pus waterfalls in the National Park another key place we want to go is Slovenia we went there a good few years ago very early in our vanli travels and we f that we didn’t really do it duee service we didn’t have enough time to spend exploring the place so we’ve got two opportunities we definitely want to go and explore the Slovenian Coast which seemingly is the tiniest piece of Coast ever I think it’s about a 20 Mile Stretch of Coastline we’re going to think about doing that and then we are wanting to thread up through southern Slovenia to the northern mountains to pick up the lakes and the triglav national park another place that we definitely wanted to visit is the Italian dolomites we did get there in 2019 on our last big European Alpine trip and we had three nights booked on a really nice campsite and it chucked it down for the first two days and we just decided to abandon that part of the trip so we want to go back to the dolomites and actually we want to spend a good week there because there’s lots of hiking things that we want to do again going back to a previous destination we’ve been to we only just popped into Austria on a trip about 3 or 4 years ago pre covid and it was on our way home and we called into zaly and had just the most wonderful three nights there so we’re not entirely sure where we want to go in Austria but we are going to be allocating quite a chunk of time to think about where we want to go we really like the Italian Lakes we’ve already visited Lake Garda and Lake KO so on our route down to get to Slovenia we think we will probably pick up an Italian Lake and maybe spend three or four days there just chilling out because it’ll be quite long journey to get to that point after thinking about all the countries that we wanted to visit and a few destinations within those countries we have had a thought about the route that we’re going to take and our main priority actually is based around the weather the weather at the moment isn’t great in the elps and there is still quite a lot of snow around so we are probably going to head more south to the Italian Lakes really would like to take in Venice somewhere along the way and hug the coastline going down through Slovenia and Croatia because hopefully that’s where the weather will be better at the point that we start our journey and then by the time we get to the Alps a month later hopefully the weather will be much better in the Alps as well as one of our aims to try and bring a little bit of order to our travel and yet still allow us the flexibility we know that there are certain parts of the trip that we need to plan in a much more ordered way so for example we’ve got Venice and plvc National Park that we know already are real tourist honey Poots and if we’re not careful we could get caught out so for those venues we are going to have to book early we are going to have to make sure that we are hitting the quieter time so of midweek we know that there are certain things that we need to organize like getting the national park pass and also getting the Venice pass if that’s required at that time of year something that we’re definitely prepared to do if the weather turns out to be absolutely rubbish in all that parts of the Alps and Croatia is to completely abandon those plans and go to completely different destinations we do still have that flexibility because we haven’t booked anywhere at the moment best laid plans and all fingers crossed will be in the elps which leads us to where we are now and this is probably one of the most exciting parts for me is actually thinking about how long we want to be in different places and what we want to do um ultimately we want to get to Croatia and probably spend a good seven or eight days exploring bits of the beaches there and the waterfalls National Park so that’s the first block that we’ve kind of put into our plans so working back from there we then realized that it was an ideal opportunity to hit the Slovenian Coast now as we’ve said previously it’s only a 20 mile Coast so we are looking for three nights and a good couple of days on that Coastline before we head into Croatia and then once we leave Croatia we have got quite a bit of Slovenia to travel through in order to get to the trigl National Park and all of the lakes and the rivers that we want to explore up there so we are going to allow ourselves a couple of days of travel through southern Slovenia and then a good old block of time six or seven days within the mountainous areas of Slovenia at this point we should be about a month into our journey and hopefully getting back into the dolomites it should be in more of the peak summertime where the weather will be a lot better because we were concerned if we went too early that some of the roads might still be closed and that the weather could still potentially not be great um and there’s a few places in the dolomites we specifically want to hit I know the Trac me Park up that seems to be the place to go we’ve seen a couple of Fab videos from herdy travels particularly that inspired us to want to go there so we’ve blocked out about a week that we want to spend in the dolomites so hopefully now we’re starting to see a little bit of a shape of our travel and we are then going to look to start making our way North and unfortunately making our way home so if we head out of the dolomites and head north it’s a quick hop over the border and we have got the whole of Austria to explore and at this moment in time we’ve got no idea where we want to go um I think it’s fair to say and we’ll put it on camera now that we don’t want to go back to zlz because we absolutely loved it and there is so much more of Austria that we want to discover so we’ve got to be really tough on ourselves and not go back to somewhere where we been before but yeah given a good six or seven days in Austria so then at our block planning stage it leaves us about four or five days in order to be able to hit our furry back in Cal and I’ll be really honest lonstein and Luxembourg um it’s a bucket ticking activity and what we want to do is just to get a flavor of those countries as to whether we want to go back there some people will be wondering why we’ve not mentioned Switzerland um we had spent two summers where we did explore quite a lot of Switzerland so we will be driving through we probably will have a night or two if we have time but we have done a lot of traveling in Switzerland and there’s a lot of places that we want to go to that are new to us so you’ll now realize we’ve just got a big black hole as to how we actually get to the start of our road trip per se and we’ve got a block of time and at this moment in time we’re not entirely sure about how we’re going to break that up that’s actually part of the fun when we went skiing in January and March we just hit the toll roads and we blasted down as fast as we could to get to the French Els this time we thought we would take it a little bit slower we’ve got seven or eight days to get to the Slovenian Coast so if we work back from there we will probably spend a couple of days traveling through France just toling our way down I quite fancy visiting the Jor Alps just on the way down for a stop over and we want to go to an Italian Lake and spend three or four days there and we want to get to Venice so we’ll plot a route Meandering our way down but we will spend a good couple of days in Venice three days on the Italian lakes and the rest of the time traveling Jackie’s latest madap idea is that we are going to potentially look to travel our way across France without using the toll roads we’ve never traveled the slow Road in France and you know we’re thinking this year is the first year I’m not quite sure as a driver how that’s going to go yeah Richard likes blasting down the motor because I don’t well I’ve never driven in Europe I may be tempted to I keep saying I will every year this might be the year that I do it particular we’re on the back roads which doesn’t make sense because Richard tells me the toll roads are much easier to drive on but yeah we’ll see where that route takes us at the beginning of this video we said that we would go through some of the bits of paperwork that you might need some of the things that we’ve been thinking about in the background before we set off this isn’t by any means a ticklist list there you do need to check yourselves particularly if you’ve got a bigger vehicle than our VW and it’s over 3 and a half tons because your rules are different to ours but this is just some of the things that we’ve had to think about yeah and as a bit of a health warning we check a couple of sites the AA site is really really good for European motoring advice um and also the government website on international travel is your One-Stop shop in terms of any paperwork requirements that you need because we reckon we were hitting probably nine maybe a little bit more countries and it does get a bit complex even though you know it’s all under the banner of Europe uh the localized rules can be a little bit different and those are the two best places to get your information from okay so let’s first start thinking about all things to do with insurances the first insurance that we went to have a look at was our house insurance because bear in mind we’re going away for 44 days which is a long trip and different insurances will in vary on how many days you can be away luckily for us we’re with direct line and our house insurance we can be away for up to 60 days on our policy that that was the first tick we buy an annual pass because obviously we’ve been away quite a lot and I thought we had 45 days um cover for any trip within that and when I went to check it actually we’ve only got 42 days which b a little bit of a problem for us because we’ve booked a trip for 44 days um I I rang to see if we could extend the annual Insurance trip day count and they said no and it would be £200 to ensure for a single trip uh luckily for us we haven’t actually got that much longer left on this annual trip policy we we renew them every summer so weighing up that we go away quite a lot we’ve actually just swapped to another travel insurance we’ve got a couple of big trips coming up very excitedly about a new continent but we’re not going to talk about that um so I did need to book a new anal insurance and I’ve just bought it Forward 6 weeks so we have had to get a new insurance but we’ve done it with Trail finders this time and they will cover us for 70 days for any trip and numerous trips in a year which is fa earlier in the year we did a video on how to check your shenen days using the 90 180 day ruling and we’ve continued to do that but it’s really important that if you have traveled to the EU over the course of the last 180 days that you do a proper count on the days that you have available to travel interestingly on this trip our final few weeks are actually sitting on our 87th shenen day because if you count back all those days it’s actually coming off our January ski trip so we’re actually okay but it’s always nice to know another thing that you need to consider when going into the EU is that you need to travel with a gck card that’s our reciprocal health care that if you’re poorly in Europe your travel insurance will cover you you but they will expect you to have a git card to make sure that you can use the hospitals while we’re on all things insurance we are very old school which causes us a problem at the moment because in our less is more lifestyle we don’t actually have a printer in the house uh so we have to go to Jackie’s mom and print out all our insurance documents in terms of our travel insurance our car insurance we have got physical copies of our mot there is a whole list of guid on the AA website that I would recommend that you go through religiously and tick off to make sure that you’ve got all that paperwork in terms of physical copies for when you’re on the road yeah what I meaning to say is you need to have your car insurance with you a physical copy y something that’s ever changing at the moment and you do need to consider when you’re traveling anywhere in Europe is what vignettes you might need when we drive through France you need to have a crit a sticker I say need to it’s only in certain cities that you need the sticker to enter but they do have a caveat that if there is um High pollution in air pollution in certain areas um one of them being around leyon where we potentially will drive through then you do need to have the criter sticker so we bought one it’s 4 something to order on the official French website you have to order it quite a few weeks in advance to get the physical copy but a lot of people do say on the forums that as long as you’ve got the email to say say you’ve ordered it you are covered so we’ve got our criter sticker already in the van and then every other country that we’re potentially going through have their own rules so I know when we go into Slovenia we can buy the vignette at the border Austria is the same we probably will be going through Switzerland at some point even if it’s just driving through it and we have to buy a Swiss vignette if we’re going to go on any of their toll roads and obviously different rules for places like Germany and Italy I’m supposing so we need to double check those most of them you can buy at the borders um but it’s definitely worth checking particularly if you’re over 3 and A2 tons because I do understand some of the countries you have to pre-order those and then another surprise which again sort of came out of nowhere was a sort of tourist tax a daily tourist tax for Venice where we we were hearing horror stories of tourists being taxed by the police with 100 euro fines and things like that we’ve looked into it we’ve tried to navigate the website we think that if we keep away from Peak weekends at the time that we’re going we should be okay but there is a very complex website to navigate and actually the tourist tax is a tiny amount but from what we believe on social media is that you can get caught out and you can get fined if you don’t have one on the appropriate day as far as the van’s concerned our mot is due at the end of May which is brilliant because it means we always get get it emed and serviced just before we go on any of our big European trips it’s just always handy to know that the van has had a good bill of health just before we leave and and as an insurance against that we have also checked that our breakdown cover covers Us in Europe and then one final thing we check is with our bank because certainly over the winter months when we were traveling across France there was a couple of situations where we had our debit cards refused particularly at pet stations um and that is a bit of an issue so making sure that your bank knows that you are out in Europe should hopefully negate against that the one thing that we are really nervous about is filling up with petrol at supermarkets see as we have been stung for um long-standing charges for petrol that we didn’t get so we now always make sure that when we buy our petrol at service stations we use a credit card yeah and a lot of people do um have specific cards that you can travel in Europe through we actually have a post office card because it’s just really easy for us to sort out and it’s just something we’ve got into we load it um with our online banking and we can keep reloading it if we need to um people travel with um revolute cards our kids travel with a monzo card which has free charges on it um but it’s just making sure we always make sure we’ve got two forms of getting access to money so the post office card and our debit cards and an emergency credit card for us so that’s it from us ironically we’ve really enjoyed this process of like unpicking what we do and trying to explain it to other people because I think it’s made it a little bit clearer in our own mind yeah some people will think we’re a little bit scatty in the way that we approach things but we tried to get that Medium we’ve tried over planning and we ended up not seeing and doing things that we wanted to do we’ve tried having no plans whatsoever and we’ve just ended up driving all over the place so hoping this time it’s going to be a little bit of a happy medium that we kind of know where we’re going to go as long as the weather stays nice so that’s it from us see you later bye [Music] [Music]

It’s nearly SUMMER and we are about to embark on an epic, 6 week road trip in our VW campervan around Europe. We often get asked how do we plan and organise our adventures and yet build in the flexibility to change our plans when we are on the road.

In this video we will take you through all our thinking and planning that has gone into our next road trip. From looking at time blocking, to keeping flexibility and prioritising key areas of the trip. As a cheeky bonus, we will take you through many of the administrative tasks that have to be completed for an extended road trip to be a successful and safe trip.

Discover our favorite tools and resources for planning a seamless and enjoyable campervan trip across Europe. Whether you’re a seasoned vanlifer or planning your first extended road trip, this video is packed with valuable insights and inspiration to help you embark on your own European adventure.

So, grab a notebook and pen, and join us as we dive into the details of planning our 6-week European campervan road trip.

We are Richard and Jackie and we live in the UK. We retired from teaching at the age of 51 in the summer of 2022. Our plans for early requirement include relocating to the Yorkshire Dales, developing our forever home and travelling the UK, Europe and eventually the world in our VW campervan Nelson.

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Many thanks,

Richard & Jackie

Timeline:
00:00 How we plan our 6 week campervan road trips
00:45 Our previous campervan road trips to Europe
02:44 The planning steps we take for our extended road trip adventures
03:04 The immovables to consider
03:31 Key destinations for our 6 week campervan road trip
05:34 Route priorities to consider
06:15 Planning vs Flexibility for our campervan road trip
07:10 Making a plan and in what order
11:55 Our top tips for campervan road trip administration