Road Trippin’ With My Two Favourite Allies
For the last four years, the month of July has taken on a special significance at Cool Bus. It used to just be about bikes, both the road and mountain varieties, but since 2016 it has been the month of the Cool Bus summer road trip.
On the first trip we spent two and a half weeks driving from Bourg St. Maurice, through the Ardeche, Pyrenees, Andorra, the Basque Country, Asturias and Galicia along the northern coast of Spain, briefly into Portugal then back across the middle via Madrid and Albarracin before heading north again along the coast via Benicassim and Cadaques.
Looking back, it was something of a test trip which helped answer many important questions and shape future holidays. Boring stuff like the best way to kit out a VW minibus to turn it into a camper van. What gear is essential and what hardly gets used and takes up too much valuable space. To take bikes or not – useful to have along have but a massive headache to transport. But probably the biggest question to be answered was, would it actually be fun? One adult looking after two young kids in a confined space and spending lots of hours on the road every day. Could go either way, right?
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And to be honest it frequently has gone either way. Tired kids bickering with each other. Angry father swinging wildly into lay-bys and slamming on the brakes to give the kids a bollocking. Late nights with not enough sleep. Crap food. Bored hours spent cruising motorways.
But the good times have been prolific. To say they outweigh the bad times would be a massive understatement. The chemistry of a group consisting of two young kids and one adult sounds like trouble but it does work and here’s why.
The adult has complete freedom to do precisely what he wants every day. To travel to places he has always wanted to see and to make all the big decisions. “Tonight we are going to dine in a car park so we can go and watch the sunset behind the Temple of Poseidon. Then we’ll go and find a campsite in the dark”. “Lunch today will consist of two bags of crisps and an ice cream from an Albanian roadside service station.” “This morning we are going to spend one hour (child’s maximum attention span) looking around the ruins at Delphi”. You get the idea.
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“Tonight we are going to dine in a car park so we can go and watch the sunset behind the Temple of Poseidon”
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Basically all the advantages of travelling solo but without the big disadvantage – you have someone there to share these experiences with. And we have had plenty of them. Hardly a day goes by without experiencing something truly breathtaking and frequently that happens several times a day.
The formula has always been very simple. A very basic camping set up that is quick and easy to pack away meaning you can move on every day. A Road Trip in its very truest form. The purpose is not simply to reach a destination but to experience all the places you are travelling through.
In 2017 we got a little more adventurous and spent three and a half weeks travelling across Italy into Slovenia, through Croatia via a few beautiful islands, then Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and into northern Greece before taking the ferry back to Italy and home.
2018 was all about Greece. Four weeks included lots of time spent on the Peloponnese peninsular before island hopping via Andros, Mykonos and Chios into Turkey. The trip back home took in Troy, Galippoli, and the very beautiful Meteoras monasteries.
In 2019 we upped the ante a bit. Five weeks saw us travel well into Asia with a full tour of Turkey (which is huge btw) and Georgia before crossing the Caucasus mountains into Russia. At this point taking the van back to Bourg at the end of the trip became unfeasible so we left it in safe hands in Sochi.
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Sometimes sleeping on the beach beats sleeping in the van
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Which brings us bang up to date. We had big plans for this year, pick the van up in Russia and continue east through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, into Tajikistan and along the Pamir highway before parking the van up once again in Kyrgyzstan but we all know why this has been unfeasible. For now that van is staying in Sochi. Since it’s currently impossible to get a visa for Russia we have no other options. All three of us are gutted not to be on the road right now and highly motivated to get the trip back underway as soon as is feasible.
And so we have had to content ourselves with looking back over photos and videos from years gone by. To that end I just posted up a 5 minute edit of our 2019 Turkey trip on YouTube which you can see below. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll post up some other photographic highlights on here too. Hope something catches your eye and maybe even inspires you to hit the road!
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