13 years ago, we bought our motorhome. When I say ‘bought our motorhome’, I actually mean ‘welcomed our third child into the family’. Because that’s how much I loved that van.
We had a sabbatical lined up and we decided to spend the summer holidays travelling around France for six weeks.
We looked at the price of motorhomes to hire. And then we coiled our eyes back into their sockets and looked again. And then we bought one instead.
(I’ve missed out a lot of humming and hahing, drinking wine, chewing fingernails, talking to the bank and scouring the internet that went on between those last two.)
We bought a secondhand German one with good resale potential and - £25,000 the poorer – said we’d sell it at the end of the trip. (We didn’t.)
The Hymer was kind of ugly but beautiful – just like a newborn baby but with less amniotic fluid.
I’d like to claim I was being canny and wise when I fell in love with it on the forecourt but that would be a lie.
I just loved its look. It looked a bit vintage, a bit foreign and not like the shiny ones that old people had. It was older but cooler.
We spent our first summer in it travelling around France for six weeks.
We started at the Eurotunnel exit in Calais and drove the 45 minutes to Le Touquet which would become a regular haunt to top and tail our adventures for the next eight summers.
We went down the west coast to Ile De Ré then on down to Blaye, Biarritz and St Jean de Luz, before crossing over the Pyrenees to Pau and having a few days in Auch and then we went to Carcassonne and to Narbonne beach before driving to Arles and then crossing up to the Alps and Annecy. We then crossed back to Paris and stayed in a campsite in Versailles before high-tailing it back to Calais. Happy days.
In subsequent years, we did similar tours around Italy and Spain and much more France.
The year of the Brexit referendum, we staged our own mini protest to the result by ticking off seven countries on a mega route (France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Italy).
Eight years and many happy road trips later, we sold our beautiful-ugly Hymer and I was distraught. Tears, nausea, pain.
Our city, like many others, went all Clean Air Zone on us, and we had to pay a tenner every time we brought the Hymer into town. We sold it to a collector in Brighton.
Aah, it must have been hard to let it go. But sounds like you had some very good times, and saw a lot of new places in Europe!
I spent a week in Le Touquet years ago and loved it.
So many adventures! What a cool van and a ngreat way to spend a holiday. Electric van dreams!?