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A life changing day: We bought our first motorhome!

Today was a life changing day. In fact it’s been a life changing week! We bought our first motorhome at the Yorkshire Motorhome Show in Harrogate. This is my blog article about why we have decided to buy a motorhome.

It’s been a life changing week because we have also decided to sell our house that we have lived in for 32 years so next week it is going on the market and hopefully it will sell quickly.  For some people this might sound like a drastic decision so let me explain why we are doing this. The main reason is that we want an adventure before we get too old.

Who are we?

We are just a normal couple! Next month I will be 62 years old. I’m fit and healthy with a young outlook on life. I’m a travel and tourism teacher at an FE college and my wife is a midwife at a large teaching hospital. Both are stressful jobs and we both feel that the time is right to follow our passion for travel.

Prior to becoming a qualified teacher only 6 years ago I had my own travel agency that I ranwe with my brother for 10 years. Travel is in my blood and I want to do more of it. My wife Anne and I have explored Europe by rail on several occasions in the last few years and we love the scenery, history, architecture, the food and the people so we have decided to tour Europe the slow way in a motorhome and then if we get bored of that we intend to live in France or Spain for a while. We are fed up of the British weather and want more sun and warmth.

Our motorhome life plans

We wanted to move house at some point soon to try living abroad for a while so all we are doing is having an adventure first. If we find somewhere to live in France or Spain whilst we are exploring by motorhome we might take the plunge and rent or buy there. Alternatively, we might come back to the UK and live in a different part of the UK other than Leeds, where we live now. We shall see how things work out.

This whole plan might sound crazy to some people especially when I tell you that we have never actually driven or stayed in a motorhome before, but we have thought long and hard about this over several months and we are very confident that this is the right thing to do.

Our plan is to spend a few weeks in the UK testing the vehicle and getting to know how things work. We are then going to get on a ferry and drive through France to Spain and Portugal before heading north again in May 2018 to Norway and Sweden before heading south again through Germany to Italy and Croatia. We might be on the road for 12 months if things work out well.

What we wanted in our first motorhome

We have visited several motorhome dealers over the last few months and done a massive amount of research. We soon decided that we wanted fixed beds in the rear and a big garage to store food and motorhome essentials in. We ended up buying a Hobby Optima DeLuxe T65GE from ES Hartley at The Yorkshire Motorhome Show. The motorhome has a good specification and I also negotiated a few more extras in the price too such as a Cat 1 alarm, solar panel with extra battery so that we can wild camp and be self sufficient, a bike rack and a TV. It’s made in Germany and is just over 7 metres long, 2.8 metres high and 2.33 metres wide. This is a high quality vehicle – a bad boy motorhome!

I’ll be adding blogs, photos and video on a regular basis when we hit the road to bring you all the highs and maybe lows of our adventure.

Here is the photo I took of our first motorhome at The Yorkshire Motorhome Show before it’s stored for us for a few weeks.

We visited the Yorkshire motorhome show and bought our first motorhome. It took us several months to decide what layout we wanted, so we took the plunge!
Our first motorhome

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