stu & kajas european tour
i decided i had had enough of england and wanted to see a bit of the world outside. kaja my girlfriend felt the same too (except shes from norway) so we bought a renault trafic van and got my sisters boyfriend to turn it into a camper. then it broke down and that followed by other problems we finally left about 4-5 months later in the beginning of jan, both broke from leaving our jobs to early. we drove straight through france and headed for the south of spain for the warmer weather. our first stop was the costa del sol, we searched for about 2-3 weeks for jobs there but no luck as it was out of tourist season and neither of us spoke spanish.
we met a couple, also travelling, in estapona who recomended gibraltar so thats where we headed next. kaja walked straight into a bar job there but it is quite sexist and not many bars or pubs will hire men. i eventually i got a job labouring on the hospital building site thanks to some friends we met who also were travelling in a renault trafic. we parked our van in la linea on the spanish side or occasionly in safeways carpark in gib. we stayed there for about 2 months before finally moving on to portugal.
we travelled through the algarve finding unnoficial campsites where people(mainly retired)parked their campers. we stayed at albufeira(lovely)quateira(crap)lagos(ok out of tourist season) and vill real(nice) all in all it was much nicer than spain, more natural and we stayed for about a month.
after that we went to benidorm which i thought was a horrible place with lovely beaches but kaja didnt mind it, we slobbed out there for a week parking at the motorway station where we got our wallet stolen.
then we drove up the spanish coast and along the sourthern coast of france and had a day stop at monaco. it was a pretty grim place-all about money,big cars and shiny suits but we had fun we drove on the grand prix track while they where building it.
our next stop was in italy which we both thought was a fantasic country, we stopped at alovely little village called moneglia for a few days and then pisa where we got to act very touristy. we stopped at florence for a day and saw the place where my parents used to live before i was born and some of the sites. then it was venice our favorite stop of the trip. we had to use a campsite outside venice, as parking around there is pretty limited, and catch the bus in for a euro, but it was great fun.
salzburg in austria was our next stop although only for a day. we both liked it, including a great little park with statues of ugly dwarves and unicorns etc.
then we went to prague which was also great but we missed alot of sites we didnt know about until after. we drove straight through germany as our money was getting low and stopped lastly at amsterdam. we only spent a few hours there as when we enquired about ferry prices from calais they quoted us about 200 euros too much. so that was when we decided to call it a day and head home as we had no money left. all in all a great trip. ps if anyone we met down in gib happens to be reading this try and get in touch through this site.
More from stu&kajaseuropetrip here