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As the title says, the party’s over!

We are back in Victoria and our lives are returning to normal. Wish it weren’t so but reality checks in and here we are. This article will be a rambling sort of thing with a group of thoughts that we noted as we went along. Hazards that you may wish to avoid or tips that may help you with planning your own trip. I will try to put these in some sort of order but because there are so many ideas they may well get a little scrambled as we go along.

One thing to remember is that we were out of our house for a total of 20 months and part of our trip included a month long trip through the southern USA to get to Halifax as well as a month returning to BC at the end of the trip. We were actually in our travel trailer for a total of 14 months.

Some of the points I will make may seem self-evident to many but may be of value to others, so please bear with me.

PASSPORTS:

You must have one. A good idea is to make a photocopy of your passport and carry it in a different location from the original. It doesn’t hurt to leave a copy with a family member at home. If you do lose your Passport in Europe, contact the police as well as the nearest Canadian diplomatic post. The police will make a report and a Canadian Consul can then arrange to get a temporary replacement that will be good for one year and will probably cost as much as a new five year version. But at least you will have your Passport. Locations of all Overseas Consular offices can be found in the little booklet BON VOYAGE that you will receive with your passport.

MEDICAL CARE:

We joined IAMAT, the International Association for Medical Assistance to Travellers. This is a free group that will provide a list of English speaking doctors with knowledge of North American medical practice worldwide. They can be reached at:

40 Regal Road
Guelph, Ontario, N1K 1B5
http;//www.sentex.net/~iamat
e-mail: iamat@sentex.net

The cost of a visit to the doctor or house call is guaranteed, and our experiences were very good.

BC MED:

British Columbia will allow residents to leave the province, and still carry basic insurance for one year, but this is not commonly known, and you must visit them in person, and verify with them your plans, and check this out, before leaving. You must carry supplementary insurance which is available from your travel agent, insurance broker or you can check the Yellow Pages. If your trip extends beyond one year you must find Primary Coverage. Our insurance company allowed us to act as our own Primary agent and they would have paid everything over and above the BC Med amount, i.e. $75/day in hospital. If your trip does extend more than a year, getting back onto BC Med coverage takes a long time. It is supposed to be the balance of the month you return plus two months but don’t believe it. In our fifth month back we got our numbers but still don’t have cards.

PHONING HOME:

Because we were gone so long, we had our home phone number disconnected so our renters could get their own service. BC Tel can provide a “non-subscriber” calling card. It entails a one time set up fee of $9.50 and you must provide a credit card number to them to ensure payment of your bill each month. We also used CANADA DIRECT service from Europe. You are given a toll-free number for each country you will visit. Simply call that number and you will be put through to an operator in Canada or, if you have a touch-tone service at the phone you’re using, to an automatic dialing service and you get billed for the long distance charges from the destination phone number back to Europe instead of the charges from Europe to Canada, which may be much higher. To call within Europe you must buy a prepaid calling card. It is almost impossible to find coin operated phones anywhere in Europe now. It cuts down on damage by petty thieves but does require you to buy the cards which are not usable from one country to the next. This may change with the introduction of the “Euro” but I don’t have details on that.

MONEY:

We used Automatic Teller Machines everywhere. Every once in a while there would be a problem with phone lines or, as in Greece, rotating bank strikes, but by and large the ATMs worked perfectly. Our bank charged us $3 per transaction so we always took as much money as we could. The advantage of the ATM is that it is open 24 hours every day, you have no language problems because you are offered a choice of several languages, English is always one option there, and you get banknotes ‘of the realm’ at a decent exchange rate.

OTHER FINANCIAL CONCERNS:

In no particular order of importance: Have a Line of Credit available. You never know when you might need it. Limit the use of Credit Cards unless you have a large bank account. The only thing we used ours for was to pay our telephone bill, and I always ran a credit balance on the card, and deducted the phone bill each month so I knew where I stood. Before we left I had arranged to have all household expenses paid by Automatic Debit. Bank people might not agree with this one, but I had all of my PINs set up with the same number. It saves having to remember several numbers and you don’t have to risk writing them down. The danger is that if somebody steals your wallet and gets into one of them they can then crack everything you have. If you lose your wallet immediately call everybody. Keep a list of your credit cards and the emergency loss phone numbers apart from your cards. Di lost our BC Tel Calling Card, but we called them and changed our PIN immediately.

YOUR HOUSE:

While we were away we rented our house, fully furnished. We removed some of our most precious items but left just about everything else. We were blessed with a good Property Manager without whom we would have been lost. We also used a Tenant Finder to locate our first renter. The most important thing that we had was a very good friend who looked after our mail and financial matters for us. We had changed our mailing address to his. We called him once a month to get an update on our bank balance, and other matters financial. An absolute godsend.

WHAT TO TAKE:

The old adage about taking half of everything in the suitcase out and leaving it behind is even more true when you go away for an extended trip. Even if you will be away for several seasons you don’t need a ton of clothing. Just use the layering technique. You will be able to wash clothing regularly, either by hand or in a machine. I mentioned in a previous article the cost of coin operated washing machines but here it is again. Expect to pay anywhere from $4 - $7 dollars for what would be considered a “small” load at home. That is just to wash, there are very few dryers. In all our time camping in Europe we came across two dryers. Take a clothes line and pins and hang it out to dry. Don’t burden yourself with a lot of cosmetics. You can buy everything you need in Europe. Maybe not the same brand as you use at home but certainly a comparable product. Prescription medicines can be a problem but if you take a copy of your prescription with you, you should be able to get it verified by an IAMAT doctor. Take a second pair of glasses and/or your prescription. We took our Obus Back Form for Diana and she blessed it every day. It was left in the passenger seat and was wonderful. A compass that you can mount on the dash or windshield comes in very handy, especially when turning off highways, or inside cities where you get easily turned around.

TRAVEL GUIDES:

There are a lot of them out there and we certainly looked at most of them and bought a bunch as well. I would recommend visiting your local library before buying any to decide what is best for you. Some that we liked: Rick Steeves’ “Europe Through the Back Door” and his “Best of” series on individual countries; the green Michelin guides are great, but the ones that we really wore out were “The Lonely Planet” and “Rough Guide” books for various countries. You can take or acquire too many, but if you don’t have enough you run the risk of missing a lot of interesting things. I think that Michelin puts out the best road maps in Europe, but get some scotch tape because they wear out quickly.

CAMPGROUND GUIDES:

We used the guide we purchased from the German Automobile Club (ADAC). It cost about $25 and is in German, but with a bit of imagination and using the pictographs we found campsites when we needed them. Another possibility would be to purchase one in English from the Caravan Club in England. They have a two volume set. Volume 1 covers France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco, Volume 2 covers the rest of Europe. The cost is 16 pounds per volume but they are very good. We looked at some that Brit friends had. If you buy them in England the cost is 10.50 pounds. You can contact

The Caravan Club
Dept MS, Freepost
East Grinstead West Sussex
RH19 1ZB England or,
on the Internet at: www.caravanclub.co.uk

Another thing you will need is a Camping Carnet International. This costs about $12 and saves you from surrendering your passport every time you check into a campground and is available from BCAA. You can get it at the same time you get your International Driving License, another must for driving in Europe.
I have not been able to ascertain if the Royal Automobile Club has a campground guide but hope to get a response from them soon. Their web-site is: www.rac.co.uk.

It is also a good idea to maintain your membership in BCAA because it gives you automatic reciprocal privileges with other automobile clubs in Europe.

SHIPPING YOUR CAR:
There are many companies that will ship your car for you. We drove our 1994 VW Jetta 4 door sedan to Halifax but could have shipped it directly from Victoria. It would go by train to Halifax and then by ship. The current cost of shipping your car from Victoria to Halifax is $1288 plus 15% tax and from Halifax to Europe $895 plus 5% of the value of the car for insurance.

There would be additional costs for port fees on the other end, about $450. The prices coming back would be about the same. The company we used was:

Rail-A-Car
1550 Bedford Highway
Sun Tower, Suite 600
Halifax, N.S. B4A 1E6
Phone 1-800-387-9000 Web Site: www.railacar.com

INSURING YOUR CAR:

When your car arrives in Europe you will have to purchase insurance for it. BCAA offers a product from an American company but their prices seemed quite high to us. It does offer full coverage which, as a tourist, you will not be able to purchase in Europe. All that is available is Third Party Liability. We got our first year coverage from the German Automobile Club (Web site: www.adac.de). If you read German that may be a good site for you. They do have a contact point on the web site and may respond to a question in English but I haven’t tried it. We paid 200 Deutch marks per month or $2040/year. Expensive but you can’t get your car out of the shipping compound without insurance. There may be other options out there. Good luck.

BUYING A TRAILER:

Arriving in Europe without a contact to buy a trailer is risky. It can be done I am sure. We were fortunate because we had family connections in Holland. I would recommend buying your trailer in Holland because the prices there are the best and there is also a large inventory of used trailers to choose from. One thing to remember, in Europe, what we call a travel trailer they refer to as a caravan. The company we bought our caravan from has assured me that they would do everything in their power to assist any other Canadians who wanted to come over to buy a trailer from them. The company name is:

CARAVANCENTRUM JAN SCHREUR
Weereweg 28,
1732 LL Lutjewinkel
Holland
Phone: 011-31-224-54 12 27
FAX: 011-31-224-54 20 30

The young lady that you want to talk to is Sandra Waag. She speaks excellent English and is very helpful.
Lutjewinkel is outside of Alkmaar which is about a one hour train ride from Amsterdam. They normally have a lot of used caravans available at prices that range from about $4,000 on up. They also offer a sale/buy-back plan, as well as offering a rental service. We used them and were happy and have no qualms about offering you their name. Good luck.

Other options might be to contact the Dutch Tourist Information Office and ask them for a list of dealers; you might find something on the Web or you may have your own contacts in Holland.
Remember, the Dutch people love Canadians and will go out of their way to help you. If you have a distant cousin or a friend of a friend over there, contact them.

OTHER STUFF:

If you travel in Italy, buy a card to pay for the highway tolls. Italians are the masters of making “slow change”. Because the numbers are so big you really have to have your wits about you all the time. On the super highways it is even more nerve-wracking so buy a card for 50,000 or 100,000 lira and don’t worry about it. At the toll gates you just put in your toll ticket, then put in your card, and the machine subtracts what it needs from your card.

Highway tolls anywhere in Europe are expensive but in my opinion are worth it because the roads are normally quite good and you won’t be holding up a lot of traffic like you would be on a two lane National road. You get to your destination more rested than when you use the slower roads.

In France you can save up to $.25/litre on fuel by getting it at a big super market.

The speed limit anywhere in Europe for a car pulling a trailer is 80km/hr. This is actually a nice speed to travel at and you can see things at the same time, but lots of people ignore the limit. We didn’t, and never got a ticket.

It is hard to say how much a campground will cost because there are so many variables but on average expect to pay around $25 per night in most of Europe and $12 - 20 in France. Lots of people “wild camp” or boondock but it is not recommended. There have been lots of people who have had their holiday spoiled because someone broke into their trailer or motorhome and stole money and belongings, or indeed savaged the occupants. We never considered the risk worthwhile. Most campgrounds have security gates that are closed at night and employ guards to patrol the site. I think $25 is cheap security. Another thing to keep in mind is that the locals do not like wild campers because they contribute nothing to the economy and generally leave a mess behind when they depart.

The price of gasoline is generally $1.50 - $1.75 per litre except in Spain $1.05 - $1.20 and Greece $.95 - $1.10 per litre.

If Sheila would let me, I could fill another 10 pages with information but I think I’ll stop here. I can’t answer all of your questions and wouldn’t want to. Part of the excitement of travelling is finding things out for yourself. Of course I will try to respond to any queries that you send but I am not your big brother. Spend time in the library, read books and magazines, surf the Net. Gather as much information as you can and then JUST DO IT!

Happy camping.