OUR FIRST YEAR FULL-TIMING IN EUROPE

November 1995

We are writing with a brief account of our travels so far and with a note of our new forwarding address, given above. We hope that this letter will stimulate you to write to us with your news and perhaps enable us to keep in better contact with you in the coming year.

The story of our journey so far would be a long story indeed. In a nutshell, Barry early-retired from Huddersfield University towards the end of 1994 and bought a 27 ft long (by 8 ft wide and 11 ft high) 'Four Winds' American motorhome. We call her 'Rosie' after Don Quixote's travelling companion and means of transport, Rosinante. We were disappointed to discover that the original steed was male, since Rosie certainly isn't, but we were finally reconciled to the name by the pink colour of her carpet, curtains and upholstery and the matching tint of our spectacles.

Margaret resigned from Huddersfield Technical College at the end of February 1995, our home in Huddersfield was rented out and we set off at the end of March. Our initial ambition was to travel overland to India but the situation in Iran and Pakistan, the reality of life on the road (it's hard sleeping with a gun under the pillow) and the cost of insurance and customs carnet once east of the Bosphorus (4 times the value of the vehicle) - all these things have caused us to think again and slow down our progress south and east, even if we haven't yet quite given up the idea.

We have now been travelling for over 7 months and we have spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe - the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary and Romania. In contrast, we have also spent many weeks cycling in the French, Swiss, Italian and Austrian Alps. We developed a taste for cycling over Alpine passes, which have heights varying from 6,000 to 9,500 ft and involve climbs of up to 5,500 ft. We completed 38 climbs totalling over 150,000 ft of climbing before snow in Austria began falling as low as 7,000 ft and put an end to that exercise for the season.

In France, we followed in the wheels of the Tour de France, which always includes Alpine passes in its annual schedule of hard roads: the Col de la Madeleine, Cormet de Roselend, Col d'Iseron, Alpe d'Huez - tight, narrow, twisting hairpins all. In Switzerland, we made the classic Alpine crossings: the Great and Little Saint Bernards, Saint Gothard, Simplon and the Col de la Forclaz as well as riding up the Matter Valley to the Matterhorn above Zermat. In Italy, we rode the steep limestone of the Dolomites: the Passo di Garvia, Sella, Pordoi, Gardena - shoulder to shoulder with the Italian motorist. In Austria, we climbed to the head of Alpine valleys: the Kaunertal, Zemmtal and Zillertal, and crossed the high passes of the Timmelsjoch and Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse. This was a wonderful summer. Long, hot, dry mornings, straining to climb to the col, the watershed, sometimes to the edge of a new country; a drink, a rest, a sausage if we were on a German-speaking border; and then the hair-pinning, brake-block-burning, bum-freezing descent past snow fields and scurrying marmots before plunging into the sun-warmed valley.

In the early autumn, we used our Alpine fitness for the contrast of cycling across Hungary to Romania and back - a round trip of about a thousand miles. Romania remains poor and depressed. Inflation (we paid 250,000 lei to spend 2 nights in an undeveloped hotel in Timisoara) is adding to the problems of unemployment, although the shops are fuller than in the empty days of the Ceausescu's. But, in the country, nothing has changed: geese, chickens and pigs wander freely in the villages under the feet of horses drawing carts; barefoot old women struggle down muddy and unmade roads, carrying maize gleaned from the harvested, collectivised fields which stretch to the horizon. No trees protect them from the cold wind on the edge of the Transylvanian hills.

The Slovakian Republic, the eastern half of the former Czechoslovakia, is a contradictory mixture of unspoilt forest, towering mountains and obscene heavy industrialisation on the edge of concrete high-rise Stalinist towns. Tanks and Tatras grow side by side. We loved the open spaces, the lack of fences or any sense of private ownership (this is true throughout much of the former Eastern Block), the woodland that stretches for miles and which looks as if it has been untouched since the first saplings sprouted. We loved the low prices, the quiet roads and the simplicity of life. Unwashed, overweight and road-worn as she was, Rosie glowed in the admiring glances of many a Slovakian male.

Hungary remains our favourite Eastern European country. Every time we visit, we find new facets to its character. We explored the south, along the borders with Slovenia and Serbia (cycling on the road to Szeged, an electric storm found us vying with cars for shelter under roadside trees as chunks of ice threatened to dint their roofs - and ours!) We rediscovered the joys of Lake Balaton, off-season and German-free; spent days along the Danube west of Budapest (the riverside towns of Esztergom, Komarno and Gyor and the beautifully preserved medieval town of Sopron); climbed Europe's most northerly (Ottoman) minaret in Eger and tasted 'the wine of kings, the king of wines' in Tokaj. We have vivid memories of a 70 mile ride in the Zemplen hills of north-east Hungary, starting out from Sarospatak on the river Bodrog. Quiet narrow roads wound among rolling wooded hills and through unspoilt, working villages, giving distant views of Slovakia to the north and the Great Hungarian Plain and the Carpathian Mountains to the east.

Spring and autumn are marvellous times to be out on the road; the weather is warm and the campsites are quiet, with no schoolchildren (or teachers). Some sites, officially closed, have let us stay in an empty corner. We had several free nights in a shady olive grove behind a restaurant, with the use of the washing lines and pegs included! Increasingly now, as the season ends and the campsites close, we are finding free parking by the sea, by a river, in a town centre, behind a petrol station, by a supermarket. Some towns provide parking places, free or for a small charge, especially and only for motorhomes, often with water and a toilet emptying point. Rosie is completely self-contained: her 5 batteries (backed up by 2 solar panels), gas tank and fresh and waste water holding tanks can last up to 2 weeks and her food supply (gleaned from the cheapest and best markets of Europe) for several months!

There are many different kinds of days on the road : cycling days; moving-Rosie-on days; domestic days (we have even learned to bake our own bread) and tourist information office-led days. There have also been sorting-out-problems days: the day the water pipe leaked; the window leaked; the roof box cracked against a passing tree; the generator shorted out; the brakes on the bikes broke; Rosie's transmission went into 'fault management mode'. There are good days, when we get a packet of letters from the UK, and less good ones, when we find ourselves surrounded by retired German campers ferreting in their roofboxes (Gerry-Attics). And there are days when we just sit and wonder how the hell we came to be doing all this!

Overall, however, it's been good to give and take with other travellers. We've been given a seat, a cold beer and nostalgic chat by an English family on the road in a converted ambulance (mum, dad, 2 children and 2 cats!) We gave coffee, biscuits and sympathy to 2 cold and tired cycle tourists in a layby, discovering that they were Czech lads on their way to Spain in search of work. We gave lunch to a young English cycling couple from Hyde we met on the 8,000 ft Col d'Izoard; they were spending their redundancy money on a 6-month cycle-camping tour of Europe, before picking up a new career. We gave a back wheel to one of a group of 3 cycling athletes from Wiltshire; he was stranded at the top of the 9,200 ft Col d'lseron with a cracked rim. A mountaineering couple from Scotland gave us some Earl Gray tea bags in return for 2 books. Another couple from Australia (2 of many we have met doing the Grand Tour in a beaten-up Volkswagen 'Kombi') gave us a fascinating insight into their lives; we gave them yet more of our stock of read-books.

We have just spent a few days in and around Venice, which was quietly, magnificently and sadly sinking into the soft, watery, autumn light. We are now following the Italian Adriatic Coast as it runs south and east from Venice, trying and nearly succeeding in catching the sun as it, too, travels south for the winter. We plan to take the ferry from Brindisi (which is still 500 miles away, as we write) for a winter and early spring in Greece and western Turkey. After that . . . que sera, sera, as we think an Italian would say (or was it Doris Day?)