1. Preparations

It started with an idea many years ago. “When can we go on a trip like you did?” from the children. They’ve grown up with the stories and the kit from our overlanding trip back in 2009/10 - and like all children - want to be involved.

So, where to begin? Relieving Charlie of his employment was an important start, the main hindrance to getting more than 3 weeks away as a family.  Then getting sign-off from the children’s school that they’re happy (or at least tolerant) of the idea of us taking the boys out of school for a term.  Fortunately, our wonderful, practical and worldly-wise headmaster, Sid, was immediately supportive and completely ‘got’ the holistic benefits to their education.  “Can I come too?!” were his first words… Excellent start!

Next was the route – with the world’s current fragile and often tragic geopolitical landscape, we were relatively constrained, with the FCDO website plotting a stark red swathe around much of Europe, meaning traditional routes further afield through Asia and Africa are heavily constrained.

Laurie in particular needed justification as to why we couldn’t go further south in Africa, or east into Asia.  A fifteen-minute lesson on current affairs in front of our map-wall at home – explaining the dangers posed by counter-insurgency and jihadist groups across the Sahel, the political situation in Libya, and the effective no-go zones imposed by the Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine conflicts – finally convinced him we should limit our ambitions to Europe and a (large) snippet of North Africa.

Having settled on this, we looked to bolster the north African element by including Algeria and Tunisia, alongside Morocco.  Algeria was highly recommended by a friend who's visited many times. It's perhaps the largest ‘undiscovered gem’ in the Mediterranean, a vast land of desert, littered with magnificent Roman ruins, untouched landscapes and beautiful, crumbling cities from another era.   Its arduous visa application process (and perhaps it’s rather out-of-date reputation) deters most visitors, but we were determined to include it.

We also planned our route to include plenty of time – perhaps two months – in the Balkans.  We’re keen to ensure this is an adventure, not just a civilised road trip round Europe – and dropping anchor (no similar car analogies unfortunately) amongst some of Europe’s most beautiful, vibrant, countries, which are hastily emerging from their own troubled pasts – felt like the right way to get it.

The vehicle?  We’ve pulled our trusty Land Cruiser out of retirement, and the ignominy of being a farm truck for the past 10 years.  A month with our old friend Julian at Overland Cruisers and she’s back, ‘expedition ready’, with new springs, shocks, belts, oils, lights and tech that didn’t exist 15 years ago when we did our last overland trip to Singapore and back.

Once Julian had worked his magic, Charlie set to with the boys creating the storage structure in the boot to fit all the boxes for kitchen, food, clothes and home-schooling (of course!) items, plus all the overland essentials – camping kit, tools, spares, fishing equipment, cricket set, guitar…

With the wonderful Penny and Aengus house-sitting for us we know our home and animals will all be beautifully looked after.  Let the adventure begin!