Last Christmas, a casual invitation to visit my husbands cousin in Sweden, turned into a plan for our first European tour in the campervan.
By the time we got home from his parents' house after the holiday, I had already started looking at ferry costs, campervan tour guides and places to swim and cycle in Southern Sweden. Not to mention adding Swedish to my collection of topics on Duolingo. Hello new special interest!!
What followed was months of prep from me and anxiously waiting for Mr W to contact his cousin and confirm as well as booking the time off - it was the first time for him to book two consecutive weeks off and our longest trip away in the van. There was a lot to do:
Prepping the van for a longer trip (new battery, possible solar panels, fitting the spare tyre carrier and a tow bar and bike rack) was a months long process given both of our physical fitness and ability to complete tasks when planned.
Fortunately, in April, I completed my final treatment and was filing the requests to get my driving license back.
The big plans invigorated me, and along with the cessation of treatment, my good mental health enabled me to begin cooking again more regularly (or heating dinner in the oven anyway) - taking away some of this load from Mr W gave him more thinking time to plan out our trip and what adaptations the van needed.
As a test of how reasonably we could expect to swim and ride in Sweden, we took the van when we went on an air bnb trip to North Wales in April, the van to carry the bikes and to make the drive more comfortable.
On that trip, we did do one wild swim in a lake on the property - it was freezing and reassured us that my neoprene swim top and our tow floats / dry robes were a very good idea. (more about swimming in a later post).
We managed a 10 mile trip on the bicycles, on rough and muddy terrain, and agreed that taking both to Sweden was a good and viable option, for us both to get more exercise and see more of the country side than our previous trips in Penny (Penny Van aka Pen y Fan) which had been largely drive, stop, eat/drink, sleep. Limited mobility had changed our holidays in a very short amount of time, so considering using the bicycles to see our surroundings was an appealing thought.
This trip decided the bike rack for Mr W - putting the bikes in and out of the back was tiring and inconvenient.
We sorted bits out and and tidied up the van and were ready for the next trial trip - Cambridge folk festival. Mr W's disability permitted us to take our camper on the main site for the first time. and this was another reminder that we needed a tow bar etc - we took his wheel chair as the previous year we had done around 12-15k steps a day - something that is completely out of reach for the Mr now.
We called this a shakedown - primarily of the new battery set up.
All went well, and we had a great time. There were three weeks until our crossing and we (he) needed to fit the hardware. After climbing on Penny, measuring, researching, turning one of the vents around, we decided we didn't need the solar for this trip - Cam however felt that a coffee machine and ice machine were vital - more on that in part two. So two exhausting weekends and we were set to go.
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