About

Hello and thank you for visiting our blog.

We are a Scottish family of 5 who moved to a France 7 years ago.  We set up this blog initially to let friends and family know where we were when we set off on an adventure-within-the-adventure for a year in a campervan in the summer of 2013.  We are now back home in France and working our way through what being “home” is all about.   And what our next adventure might be…..

You are very welcome to read on if you would are interested in

– moving abroad to live,

– you want to take your kid out of school for a while to travel or you are interested in alternative schooling in general,

– you feel the urge to squeeze your family into a campervan for a year with no known destination

– you are interested in language teaching or learning (I’m a bit of a grammar geeky English teacher) and you maybe want to travel with that

– you like recipes (husband is a baker)

– or you just want to have an adventure from your sofa through someone else’s eyes to Japan or Morocco or Greece or Serbia or………

The campervan bit 

A cautionary tale: you should never ever doodle on a google map. In early 2013 we got the idea that we’d like to see a bit more of the world, hereish…..

We went WAY off the mark.

We set off at the end of the summer, 2013. We spent quite a while slowly driving and eating our way through various French regions, before heading into Spain and Portugal. Then an entirely random and without-campervan hop to the UAE and Thailand, and back to Spain (to pick up the campervan) and over to Morocco.

After Greece via Italy we worked our way up through Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Germany back to France.

We spent a lot longer in each country than planned, and it was utterly brilliant.  Part of the adventure was having no plan. We were, effectively, permanently lost. Or as the man who said “you can’t ever be lost if you don’t mind where you’re going”, we were never lost.

How to move around the blog

* You can click on the LONG blog name (sorry, seemed like a good idea at the time) to see the regular posts and pictures of the places we visit. Six posts feature at the top; scroll down to see the rest, in date order, or do a search for a topic.

* You can search past posts by clicking on the green magnifying glass button at the top right of the page. Choose a topic like “travelling with children” or “Thailand” or whatever interest you. We were a bit pants at organising the blog, but we are getting better.

* You can press the 3 stripes button to the right of the magnifying glass to look at permanent pages about us, the van, our route etc.

* You can click on follow the blog if you’d like updates sent to you automatically.

* You can read some of the posts in French – they will say “aussi en français” at the top; then do a search of “Français”.

But more important than anything, you can sit back and enjoy the pictures from afar and the tales of us getting lost/falling out in foreign lands.  If you would like to use any of them, please do get in touch first.

If the average life expectancy in ancient times was 20 – 25 years, then 13 and 14 year olds must have helped build the Pyramids. We don’t want our two sons and daughter to build a pyramid; well not one with chambers and mummies and stuff. But young people are way smarter than we often give them credit for and what they (and we) learn and how we learn it will be an adventure in itself.

Thanks Adam for our lesson one – “how to set up a blog”

And thank YOU for joining us :). If you are from Greenland or China, an even bigger welcome…..

The countries from where our posts have been read – the darker, the more visits.

Jen, Neil, Adam, Matt and Katie x