We are heading back early from our three week European tour to attend Vanlovefest 2024 at Elvington Airfiled in York. We started off this morning from the aire in Calais, France and arrived at Elvington in the glorious sunshine. This is our second trip to Vanlovefest and we have e a couple of friends attending this year too. We bought our MiRiders here last year so I’m looking forward to cycling past all of the vans on the runway – and we have Lola our Miniature Pinscher pup with us this year (on the back of Wendy’s MiRider).
We parked up on the edge of the sea at Garlieston Bay. It’s really nice here and we’ve enjoyed walking along the beach, around the harbour and watching a Heron and Cormorant. We’ve enjoyed spectacular sunrises and saw some of the Milky Way in this dark sky area. There is one pub/restaurant at the Harbour Inn and one cafe at the Hive cafe. Both are good and the people are friendly. Storm Babet created high winds overnight and since Wendy never slept a wink we decided to head home a couple of days early. We plan on returning.
Sadly we start to head north in this episode as we start the return trip home.
We stop off at Chamonix where we experience some parking problems, then head North to the lovely aire at Bonneville. We were surprised to see journalist for the Tour de France parking up here.
Then we are off to Epernay for Wendy to buy some Mercier champagne and we park up overnight at an excellent aire. One of the best I’ve stayed at so far.
We then head further north to the aire at Calais and have a nice trip to the beach, and finally we travel on the Eurotunnel, park up overnight at Carlisle and then head to Glasgow. As we cross the Scottish border our normal weather returns!
We’ve embarked upon our European Tour starting from Glasgow, Scotland and heading to Lake Garda in Italy. We plan to drive through France, Belgium, Germany and Italy.
We plan to drive south through Germany along the Romantic Road (Romantische Strasse) before finally heading for Lake Garda in Italy.
In this episode 1 we travel from Folkestone on the Eurotunnel, then drive through France and Belgium arriving in Cologne, Germany.
We’d love to know what you think so feel free to comment.
Our second consecutive visit to Camp Quirky. The event was good, although due to our 9:30pm arrival we could not park up in the event on the Friday evening. The earliest we could park up the van was 10:00 on the Saturday morning and we were located in the overflow area. The ground is much rougher here and we really didn’t feel part of the event located down here. Pity really, as otherwise Camp Quirky is well organised and run.
We visited Northumberland for the first time, parking up at Waren Mill campsite. The campsite was very muddy so it was a good opportunity to test our new BF Goodrich KO2 tyres. All went well whilst several vans around us needed towed off the grass. Nevertheless, after the holiday weekend we moved pitch to a hardstanding.
We visited several of the small villages, and castles, along this coastline. There’s lots to do here so we may well return for another trip in the future.
The Holy Island causeway was a chance to try out my DJI mount on the outside of the van. I was worried my camera might fall off. Everything went well though, except I messed up the camera clamp mounting on the way over.
We were attending a family wedding so we decided to take our campervan and stay at the Findhorn aire. We were also joined by our son and daughter in our son’s recently converted Caddy Maxi. You’ll have ready previous posts about the conversion if you’ve been following our journey.
The aire at Findhorn is brilliant. It’s clean and modern, with an electronic booking and access system. Everything worked perfectly from arrival to departure.
We arrived late the previous evening and loved the lack of light pollution. This is the view from our van at 10:30 pm. With the correct conditions you can see the Northern Lights. Unfortunately we did not on this occasion.
It’s a few minutes walk from the aire to the beach.
There is a maximum two day stay so the aire was emptying the day we left and provided a good opportunity to capture the Caddy Maxi in the foreground and our Ducato in the background.
We travelled from the Glasgow area arriving at Stratford race course on the Thursday evening. The area we had booked was already full so we parked up in the overflow area and had a walk around to investigate. This is a huge show with a great variety of campervans and overland vehicles to see.
We raised our usual flags to help us find our van on the way back. although they were dwarfed by some others. The flags also celebrated the Queen’s platinum jubilee on this occasion.
This image doesn’t do the show justice. There were so may vans. The video at the end of this post captures the scale of the show much better. We finished the day with a relaxing campfire.
I do like a timelapse and we watched the sunset. For some reason the video is not embedding, so it can be viewed at this link https://youtu.be/9seOwSDCFcI
It was really nice to meet and chat with more people we watch on YouTube – Greg and Lou Virgoe, Rick and Debs Beechwood, John and Mandy. We met Alex Frood and Liam the Terrible at Quirky a couple of weeks back. It’s good to meet in person having watched these peoples’ van lives for quite some time.
We also started our campervan sticker collection so we just need to decide where to place these on the campervan – and get our own stickers printed of course.
The video captures an overview of the scale of the show – it’s huge. There were some brilliant vans with really fancy paint jobs and some interesting overland vehicles.
On a different topic, we are getting close to finishing the Caddy Maxi conversion in preparation for a family convoy to France. Wendy keeps us right advising we only have two days left over weekends before we depart. You can view the microcamper conversion here.
So we spent four days at North Ledaig, near Oban. We’ve been here many times over the years and we love it here. You can’t beat this view from Hylda’s windscreen…
The pitches are all staggered so almost everyone has a view of the sea. The drone picture below shows the site layout quite well.
It’s Scotland so we get a lot of rain, but the sunsets are spectacular here –
The water in Ardmucknish Bay is crystal clear
Oban airport is adjacent to the campsite, so you can also watch light aircraft if that interests you. The video captures most of what North Ledaig and Ardmucknish Bay has to offer, there’s also forest walks accessed from nearby Benderloch. This is around fifteen minutes walk from the campsite, along the paved cycle track.
Permission to fly my drone was granted by Oban airport.
McNaughts On Tour 