Merry Christmas Everyone! Hope you’re all having a wonderful time with family/friends and enjoying the festivities!

It’s day 2 of our trip and we didn’t get our day one update out yesterday due to some data roaming issues 🙁 plus we ended up driving most of the day, but we’ve been putting together some photos and videos and any that we don’t get on here, we’ll get to you soon.

Although this is our personal journey and we are hoping some of you will follow just to see how our story goes, we’ll try to make it as informative as we can for any of you looking to do a European tour yourselves. We cant fit everything on here so there will be lots of links to relevant websites for each place/attraction we visit. If any of you want more\less of anything then please feel free to give us your feedback/comments!! If you haven’t already, then sign up at the bottom of the web page and we’ll automatically notify you whenever we post an update!

Beautiful Sky shot taken from the top deck on the Ben-My-Chree facing toward Cumbria

We do have a vague plan together on where we want to go, where we really want to go and where we need to be at certain times but everything else is subject to ‘we’ll see how it goes’.

Our Vague Plan!

We really want to spend a few days in the snow in the Alps, we really want to go to see some Christmas markets, and also to be in Venice for the New Years celebrations. And we must be in Zagreb, Croatia for 2nd Jan for our daughter (Mia) to catch a flight home (she’s back to work on the 3rd)! Along the way we’d like to visit Vienna, Milan, maybe Prague, and Luxembourg

Our Journey Begins

We set off early yesterday morning (24th) on the 7am sailing on the Isle of Man Steam Packet crossing from Douglas to Heysham.

We picked up our hire van at lunchtime (a very similar model to ours but a lower spec and this motorhome is on a Ford Transit, whereas our one is on a Fiat. They are very similar vans but there is a very short supply of Fiat chassis’ at the moment). It took us about an hour to do the handover and load all our stuff into the van but it was a really straightforward process and John from the hire company explained everything clearly!!

This was the first time the kids had seen the MoHo in person and got to appreciate how good it looks and how luxurious the interior is! We’re now even more excited to go and collect our own one (and it’s even nicer)! It comes with everything you could possibly want, from the plush white leather interior with the U shape lounge, to the cozy king sized beds and lots of storage space too!!

We had 8 hours to get to the Eurotunnel which should have been a 6 hour drive but with a stopover at Asda to stock up on snacks (and buy an Asda mobile SIM card for roaming data), we ended up just on time!

If you’ve never been on the Eurotunnel, it is so streamlined and simple, we pretty much drove straight through the port with a few minutes for Passport control and straight onto the train. Less than an hour later we were in Calais, France.

We were aiming for Luxembourg but it had been such a long day and tiredness was setting in! Luckily, in Europe, there are Aires (MotorHome stopover sites) every 20-30km or so and most of them are free too! (Aires are brilliant and worthy of more than just a quick mention so we’ll tell you all about them in another blog post!). We found a lovely little spot just a couple of miles off of the motorway just outside Brussels and parked up for the night.

We needed a bit of a long lie this morning (and it is Christmas Day after all) so we didn’t get on the road until 11am. We had a stressful start to our journey with the sat-nav losing signal and sending us almost an hour the wrong way but eventually we got it fixed and on our way towards Luxembourg.

We made an unplanned stop along the way when we saw an interesting looking sign for Dinant Citadel. The whole town was so picturesque but our photos just don’t do it justice and you really must see it for yourself. The Citadel is basically a fortress built on top of a towering rocky hill, overlooking the town and the Meuse river. The Citadel itself was closed for Christmas but it was still definitely worth the detour and we took this opportunity to test the drone out for the first time here too and managed to get a look inside the ramparts from above. We will hopefully post the footage of this later.

Dinant Citadel overlooking the River Meuse

Fruit & Wine shop in Luxembourg

We arrived in Luxembourg around 6pm, and managed to park in the City centre. I would imagine it would be almost impossible any other time of the year and although there were still a surprising amount of people around, lots of places were obviously closed for the day (including the Christmas market). Although, we were suprised with how many restaurants and shops were still open as the Isle of Man is pretty much completely closed on Christmas day. In hindsight, we really should have had some daylight time here as the city is supposed to be beautiful, but you don’t see much of it’s glory at night.

Christmas market (closed unfortunately) in Luxembourg!

We took a quick walk around the main city centre and decided to stop at a little sandwich shop for dinner (Steak sandwiches in lieau of traditional turkey & trimmings 🙂 ). Then on to see the Cathedrale Notre-Dame and back on the road again for the next 200 mile leg to Colmar in France “the most Christmassy town in Europe”!

Cathedrale Notre-Dame, Luxembourg

We made it about halfway then stopped at another camper park (Aire) to get showers (the motorhome shower turned out to be surprisingly good and was enough for all 4 of us) and get some sleep for the night, with an earlier start planned for tomorrow.

That’s all for today! We’ll get tomorrow’s journey out to you as soon as we can and hope you’ve enjoyed reading!