The past years we have noticed a trend of retro Volkswagen Camper Vans being popular again, especially among surfers. We have seen many of them, this blue one in France one year.

Funny thing is: I just saw a camping tent that is a VW Camper Van Blue Retro at Coolstuff, that is a twin to the one above!

Incredible! Oh, how I want this one, but can’t afford right now. Have to save as much as we can for our Europe trip later this year… *sigh*

Me want! Me love! I would be such a happy camper…

©Lifecruiser Love Camper Van’s
 

We haven’t told you yet about our travel plans for this year so far. We start on Tuesday with a shorter road trip within Sweden to meet our Norwegian blogger friends. Later this year we will meet them again, but also our French blogger friends at the same time.

The upcoming trip on Tuesday is something we’ve had in mind for a long time since the first time Renny and Diane invited us there, but haven’t been able too, despite the short distance to drive to Mariestad from Stockholm: about 30 kilometers the way we’re taking, some smaller roads involved.

This is not the first time we meetup with our Norwegian blogger friends, the first time was when Tor and Anna did visit our summer island in July 2007, the second time when we went to Tor and Anna’s birthday party in Norway September 2008.

The third time was when we all (including Renny and Diane) went to visit Claudie and Pierre in the French Riviera in August 2009 for around a week of awesome nights together and sightseeing during the days.

When we left Claudie and Pierre we did a week of exploring by ourselves, but I think I’ve only written about Saint Paul de Vence medieval village – also in southeastern France. Shame on me for not having sorted the photos and written about it yet!

The forth time was when we went to the bigger blog gathering in Olso, Norway in August 2010, arranged by Renny and Diane, with wonderful bloggers from around the world participating with a lot of awesome Oslo sightseeing.

After that we’ve been talking about a repeat of the blogger meeting success in France and in August this year it finally will become a reality – in Claudie and Pierre’s newly built house! Yay!

This time we will not meet our Norwegian blogger friends at the airport in Marseille as last time: this time we will be driving from Mid-Sweden to southern France, doing stops and exploring on the way there – and on the way home too, taking another route back though.

We will sure avoid the start fart of the France trip we had last time, by driving our own car this time -avoiding all fuss or mistakes. Now we also will enjoy the road trip more because we have a new car. Yep, a brand new crossover we bought in December 2011 for about all our money we had right then, but we simply had to, because of my bad back and body. This one is higher. I had such troubles getting in and out of our old car that sometimes it took me up to 15 minutes to get in. Sometimes it even was impossible.

Besides that, it was old and had it’s flaws and we were afraid that something would breakdown while out on the road with it. Night mare breakdown scenario’s in European roads went by in my mind… That is not likely to happen with a new car, though now we also have double security in our car insurance that is valid almost all over Europe, just a phone number to call and get road assistance and rental car while they’re repairing ours. Super!

What routes we’re going to take isn’t quite decided yet and won’t be decided up to 100 percent either, but we will probably take a west route down through Germany -> The Netherlands -> Belgium -> Luxembourg -> France and on the way back home again we want to drive through Switzerland -> Liechtenstein -> Austria and make some stops there – especially in Salzburg. It will be at least 3-4000 kilometer to drive – one way.

We have always wanted to do a Europe tour by car. In 2008 we did a really long road trip, 4620 kilometer from Sweden to Spain, but that time it was more a transportation to help our best friend to move there and not any real sightseeing along the way.

We already have some information gathered about certain places on the routes we will take this time through Europe, but I can’t write about all of them now, you have to wait until we’ve sorted out and prioritized which ones would be in our final travel plans.

It gonna be places that have been high up on our wish list to go for a long time. There are sooo many other awesome places we would have wanted to visit, but it would take many months to do that, so we have to narrow the list down a lot and it’s very difficult to do that since we really want to go everywhere!

There are a lot of boring motorways and really expensive toll roads in Europe that we want to avoid, so there will probably many extra kilometers driving because of that too.

What routes, places or accommodations would you recommend to us, that is a simple must to go, see or stay at? Give us your suggestions and tips, we’re welcoming everything even though it will be a tough call to choose…

©Lifecruiser Love Europe Road Trips
 

One of the worst thing that can happen to the traveler when out on outdoor sightseeing is when the weather becomes extremely bad. Especially when it’s so foggy that you can’t see a thing. We’ve experienced that a couple of times , as well as other travel failures…

This travel photo above is from one of our days at Tenerife island in Spain when we had to give up sightseeing that day, luckily we had more days there. Another day we had fog all the way up on the road to the Teide volcano, but after just minutes after we arrived there, it cleared up around the peak and we succeeded to see it!

That was not the fact another time when we were on the most beautiful part of our bus tour in Southern Ireland and we got so severe fog that we literally could not see our hand in front of us… Yep, we totally missed one of Ireland’s most spectacular areas – The Ring of Kerry – and the weather still was bad when arriving to the famous Cliffs of Moher.

Luckily, we had a very experienced bus driver that said: lets drive to a nearby lunch place and eat lunch and have a short walk around and then come back on this road and if we’re lucky, the fog has disappeared by then. And it had, we could walk up the cliffs to admire the view.

When we should do sightseeing at the Tower in London, we also had severe fog – and rain, but that was not a complete surprise for us as London often can be…

Another very foggy place were when we were at the Niagara Falls – we could see them, but we had big problems taking any photos without destroying the cameras! We should have had waterproof camera cases. We did not have the same problem at all att the Iguazu Falls in South America at all.

The funny thing is: when we’ve traveled to places where we expect to meet bad weather, we have had great weather and when going to the opposite places, like beach vacations, we have had bad weather. Remember my bad weather curse?

That’s why I always like to have plenty of time for sightseeing, to have several opportunities to come back to a sight. Fog can’t stay around forever. Or can it?

©Lifecruiser Love Travel

 
Other travel related posts by Lifecruiser:

Our Ireland Trip
Costa Adeje Holiday Tips
Niagara Falls six years later
World Heritage Iguazu Falls, South America
Thursday Thirteen Travel Curse