It's all becoming awfully real : the van passed it's AA inspection with near perfect colors, and should be in my grubby paws some time on Wednesday.

So now there is a mad flurry of planning and preparing and packing and oh wow...it's actually coming true!

EHIC - check
CCI - check
Insurance - check
Safe - check
Breakdown cover.....ok, one more thing to do.

I've got melamine plates in the post, and it's time to start dragging out the "stuff" I've been collecting for the van over the last few days into a giant heap. Of course, there is one major dilemma I havent solved yet - what do I do for pans? I hate aluminum cheap stuff, it's dire for cooking on, but my usual cast iron heavy duty stuff is going to consume gallons to gas to heat up. And then of course, there is storage - how? where? folding handles or not to fold??

Exciting times!

Woosh! Like every good project, something had to go wrong. It's been an interesting lesson in reading the fine print, doing things in the right order, and planning ahead. Thankfully, although I messed up the order of two tasks, it's only delayed me two days, and cost me £79.00 . Sadly the van turns out to be a Cat D insurance writeoff : reasonable to have it back on the road and all that, but a pain to insure and a pain to resell so not what I want. I've managed to cancel everything fairly painlessly , and put an (accepted) offer on my second best choice. So that's now going through the inspection process quite happily.

Lesson learned : you cant speed up a project by jumping ahead of tasks, it's only likely to come back and bite you!

Second best choice is exactly the same van, so although the reg is wrong in the picture, it's basically exactly the same.  I do have a few photos of the "pre-cleaned up" interior.

Fingers crossed.

 Fingers crossed folks!
Hopefully this will be my home from home very soon.

Hurdle number one : buying the truck!

I've found a very nice van which seems good value for money , but as I'm going to be solo, I'm being exceedingly cautious and making sure that I have it fully checked out by the AA. That in itself is proving to be a nightmare.....they need 3 working days notice, the vehicle has to be MOT'd (seems obvious, but a garage aint gonna MOT something that's sitting on it's forecourt) and it needs to be on site.....and the MOT location is off site........ AARGH! Everything seems to be on a go slow, when I want it to hurry up and get a move on!

One light in the day - it passed it's MOT first time, with no surprises. Now to get the AA check.

I've decided to go travelling : not very far, or for very long at the moment, but definitely travelling. So the journey starts here : finding a van, getting it checked out, buying it, filling it up with lots of lovely new goodies to make it a home from home.

And, as I do 5 star travel, it's got to be planned thoroughly, and packing starts now, at least 2 weeks ahead. So I'll update the blog as I go along with what I get up to, photos as they become available and things I learn.

Bon Voyage!