WORLD OF WILL

We've been in Sweden a couple of days now. We drove over the Øresund bridge to get here – there's a road tunnel under the sea and then the majes tic, sweeping bridge that connects Denmark to Sweden – and I'd been excited about this moment since before we left the UK. I had the idea of videoing this momentous journey, so Claire got the video camera out and we started filming as we em erged from the tunnel up onto the bridge its elf. I'd forgotten to charge the battery, however, so we got 90 seconds of footage of us driving out of a tunnel. It's probably just as well though, because it's quite a long bridge and after a while it got a bit "samey". Nobody would have wanted to sit through that. After leaving Mälmo, at the bridge's end, we headed to Ystad, which is the home town of depressing fictional Swedish detective Wallander . He wasn't there. We then went on to A les Stenar, near Kåsberga, which is the site of some bronze age standing stones ...

Today we decided to cycle into Copenhagen from our campsite, a journey which the campsite guy said would take "about an hour". Two hours later we were asking for directions from a bewildered school teacher in an area that didn't have nearly enough vowels in its name. In Denmark, bikes have right of way no matter what. It's very disconcerting when you get to a junction and all the cars wait for you to decide what you're doing and keep out of your way. What ends up happening is instead of cycling the London way, very defensively, you get all arrogant and King-of-the-road in your demeanor. Once we and our new-found air of superiority finally got to the centre we thought it all looked very lovely and charming. A lot of it would have looked far better if it wasn't being dug up, repaired or covered in scaffolding. Lovely and clean and neat though Denmark is, they just can't stop tinkering about with stuff. Not one thing we've visited so far has been uncon...

It's been very windy in Denmark since we got here which has made driving the van very stressful. My arms ache from constantly wrestling with the wheel to keep it on the road as the high crosswinds try to blow me into a ditch/a bridge/oncoming traffic. I might as well be driving a sail. It's equally stressful for Claire too I imagine as she watches me shriek like a girl, clinging to the steering wheel like I'm Gollum and it's The One Ring. On Tuesday I manfully piloted us up to Skagen and Grenen right at the very tippy top of Denmark – it's that little nipple bit, top right if you look at a map. There we found a beautifully desolate bea ch littered with a few WW2 gun emplacements. Because the beach goes to a point, there's this weird phenomenon where the waves of the North Sea crash in from the left and the waves of the Baltic Sea crash in from the right and where they meet at the tip there's this sort of ridge of surf as the two seas collide. So mesmerised...

Now, those of you that know me quite well will know that I am sometimes guilty of slight exaggeration. But I swear to you that today I was genuinely chased off a firing range by the Danish army. As you know, we're not very far into our year off - in fact, today is our first day on foreign soil. We were driving up this beautiful spit of land that runs up the west coast of Denmark and it was all a series of lovely fishing villages, remote churches and sand dunes. We stopped to h ave a walk along the dunes next to what seemed to be a gloriously deserted beach. I ran down onto the sand to take a picture of Claire up on the dunes when I noticed an army Landrover hurtling down this same gloriously deserted beach toward me. As it drew closer it started frantically beeping its horn – as if maybe I hadn't seen it. It drew up next to me in a flurry of sand a nd a quite irate soldier with a moustache started shouting at me. In Danish. When I calmly explained that I was English, he expla...

I'm writing this in our cabin on the Dana Sirena, a DFDS ferry en route to Esbjerg in Denmark. OK, so we're not technically "abroad" yet but we are "aboard" - and at least we've finally left the UK. Not without drama of course… the Ebay van suddenly required "servicing", so was hospitalised for a few days. Then the key parts it needed got sent to Crawley instead of Swindon - a confusion inexplicable by either geography or spelling. Meanwhile we had the last of our Hep B jabs for Asia which was VERY traumatic for three reasons: 1. Claire (the girlfriend) ha d booked us in to have them done at some sort of drop-in centr e for heroin addicts; 2. the administering nurse was in such a bad mood because we'd got there late that she act ually took a run up to launch her needle into my arm; 3. I reacted badly to the vaccine and sank int o a miasma of ill health for about three days (Googling the symptoms revealed I'd co ntra cted Malaria). Then...

Hi. My name is Will Fox and I have just turned 40. Cue one mid-life crisis. My girlfriend and I (the two most disorganised people in all of God's green goodness) have decided to pack in our jobs and go travelling for a year. You know, like students might do. This blog will be a record of just how utterly useless we will be at that. We have broken our year into three legs... LEG 1: Let's go to all the bits of Europe we've never been to before. And let's do that in a totally inappropriate vehicle. Let's go on Ebay (true story) and buy a 5.7litre V8 Chevy motorhome that's the size of a starter home and uses more fuel than the space shuttle. Yeah, that'll be fine. LEG 2: I'm pretty sure not many people go backpacking around South East Asia. I'm fairly certain we'll be pioneering adventurers, seeking out new lands and possibly the first Westerners to ever set foot in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Nobody's ever done that before. LEG 3: L...