We made it to Tom’s house near Brighton! The journey was really tough and I’ve had quite enough adventure so might head home. Ben’s never been this far South, we feel a little out of our depth.

Having a van is really useful. So far it has:

• Moved 4 ex-students and all their stuff back home. Tom won the prize for most clobber, although Heulwen is a smaller person so she wins the “most clobber per unit body mass” category.
• Been makeshift scaffolding. first week of work was roofing a barn so we put boards across the roofrack at the back of the van and used it as a mobile platform!
• Shifted a 200year old (estimated!) oak tree’s worth of planking.
• Taken 6 bicycles, 1 tandem, 1 pub bench, 70pints of Arundel Gold beer, 2 crates of John Smiths, 2 magnums of wine, 300 hardback copies of “Austin 7, complete racing history”, 1 advertising board for said books, 1 gas cooker, 4 rucksacks of clothes, a comprehensive toolkit, 20l of water and 1 very fashionable jumper (not to mention 2 people) to Gloucestershire and back – although obviously the beer did not return!
• towed a hot and bothered 1907 Mors Le Sanglier racing car through Midhurst town centre
• and you can sleep in the back!

The ferry is finally booked and a date for leaving the UK has been set. On the 15th august us and our trusty van (which Will has named Nevil, in case anyone wonders who the hell is this third group member!) will arrive in the beautiful port of dieppe ready for the first leg of the trip down to italy. Much consumption of vin rouge is expected and the possible addition of two special guests to our intrepid group!

The van was filled to the brim with Asda shopping bags, beer crates and wellington boots this weekend as we provided the “alternative” bus route to glastonbury! A wet and muddy weekend later, having been well entertained by the arts and music of pilton, Nevil was crammed with empty shopping bags and beer crates and lots of mud! We’d lost the wellies…

The car park queues afterwards provided some testing offroading – perhaps a trial for the Romanian roads to come?

Thank you to Mr. A. Kharamed of Lockleaze garage, Bristol, who has seen us through the first stage of the journey… the MOT!!!

After a spot of welding on the front chassis member and a little attention to the brakes and steering linkage we got our piece of green paper for the hefty sum of £308.64. Whilst I was checking what had been done I spotted a rather large crack on one of the front spring hangers, another thing to be added to our list of “jobs.” Obviously this is passable for an MOT! Lucky I caught it here and prevented a potential nose dive into a ferry terminal.

The next step is to give it a good service and get a few spare parts, then start offering our “man-with-van” services in time for house moving season. First deadline is seats in the back for Glastonbury…

My trip to Leeds train station and back to pick up Nevil was all made worthwhile this weekend when it had its first outing in “camper” mode! Unfortunately Ben had to see a man about a dog and finish some degree or other and so was unable to come.

Wiscombe Park Vintage hill climb was the delightful venue for this trial, in support of another potential long distance traveller, a 1907 Mors racing car (www.pekingparisraid.co.uk). The test went swimmingly, literally… it rained most of the weekend and so I was very pleased to have a solid roof over my head! I used the new stove to heat up spag bol for the eight campers and slept the night on the floor in the back. It was quite comfortable and warm enough, but the rain made an unbelievable noise on the roof – some modification needed here I think. Saw a landrover with a “radiation shield,” excellent idea!

The van is still very bare inside and so to make the most of the space I decided to take a “borrowed” pub picnic table. It fitted perfectly inside providing covered seating and a nice table to sit at!

It was great waking up in the morning on a particularly wet and miserable day, and being able to sit up out of bed and put on a brew. Unselfishly the campers helped me drink a few gallons of cider to enable the containers to be used as water bowsers… If I keep collecting at this rate we’ll be carrying enough water to start a small irrigation business in the Gobi!

Also tested the van out “offroad”, the parking field was on a slope and particularly wet and slippery. I got the back end out whilst traversing the slope and ended up reversing up the hill to try and get a little more grip! New tires are definitely a must, but I feel that we are almost certain to get stuck at some point and so should go prepared… perhaps a compressor so we can let the tires down and maybe some ladders.

For the way back my bro found a bit of old fencing wire which I quickly fashioned into a new radio aerial – get much better reception now and so I rocked out to Radio 2 before switching to some classical when Alan Titsmarsh made an appearance. 147mile round trip, 4 gallons of diesel, 2 gallons of cider, 2 bottles of wine, 1 gallon of spag bol, 2 gallons of water, several apples, 4 pans of tea, 12 eggs, 24 rashes of bacon, and a loaf of bread.

So, we’ve bought a van and have done lots of research on the web while supposedly going through the final few hoops we have to jump through to get our degrees, but we haven’t actually got much of a concrete plan yet. Having the van is good though – there’s loads of stuff that needs doing to it, mainly small cosmetic stuff such as building some bunks, a table and carpetting it out. It’s in the garage having a premature MOT today so hopefully we’ll know whether for our £475 we got a bargain or a death-trap!

I keep getting lots of questions about our route and seeing as this blog is public I guess some people might like to know what we’re doing…

This summer after myself and Will have finished our degrees at Bristol (Computer Science for me, and Mechanical Engineering for Will) we’re heading off in a van from the UK with the vague destination of India. I’m waving goodbye to freedom and a distinct lack of responsibility (i.e. university) in January 2008 when I start a full-time job so this is to be my last big trip for a while – hence the idea to do a big fat road-trip.

India has always been somewhere I’ve been dying to visit, and Will isn’t too fussed about India but wants to see Eastern Europe and beyond – so this seemed as good a compromise as any . We might not actually make it as far as the subcontinent but as our engineering degrees have taught us targets are always good and neither of us are particularly fussy about where we end up anyway… Mongolia? Beijing? Japan?… Folkestone? Who knows how far our 1994 Mercedes ex-carpenter’s van will take us. I’ve mapped a route out on Google Maps, the main thing to take from it is that we’re definitely heading EAST – everything else is a little more vague… http://tinyurl.com/32mc5x

Even though we’re not setting off for a while yet I thought I’d start this blog now for several reasons. Firstly it will be a nice record of our trip from it’s early preparations to our successful arrival in… wherever, and secondly it’s one more distraction from writing my thesis. Maybe we’ll put up some of the lessons learnt from the trip to do with… well, stuff we learn for anyone who fancies doing a similar thing themselves sometime.

Suggestions, comments etc. are more than welcome – just leave a comment below this post.