WORLD OF WILL

We emerged from the Mont Blanc tunnel into the sunny Italian countryside and a fairly persistant cross-wind that battered us around the autostrada like a crisp packet. There’s pretty much just the one route you can take across the top of Italy towards Milan and so, to break up the monotony, the Italians have thoughtfully built a series of medieval castles on every available hillside for travellers to gawp at. Literally every mile or so another fortification would hove into view – some of them were so close together it was like driving through some kind of historical housing estate. We stopped at a campsite just outside Milan and I was immediately set upon by the nation’s entire EU quota of mosquitos. But even these were outnumbered by Irish traveller kids, swarming over the place like a plague of evil munchkins. While they didn’t bite us quite as much as the mozzies, they did run riot around the campsite hurling insults, stones, pool cues and each other with equal enthusiasm. We st...

It’s been two years since we returned from what I like to refer to as our “World Tour”. We went back to work, back to “normal” life and, as Soul II Soul once sang, back to reality. Now, with a couple of redundancies under our belt, we’ve decided to go back on the road. So, what’s changed? Well, our Ebay van, the massively ungainly mobile bungalow with a 5.7litre V8 engine went, fittingly, back on Ebay to bring its own particular brand of joy/heartache/stress-related illness to a new owner. With the proceeds we have “down-sized” to what is almost the polar-opposite in vehicular terms - an air-cooled Volkswagen T25. It is essentially a bright yellow bread bin with a wheel on each corner, powered by the motor from a lawnmower. This means that it is much easier to drive but much smaller to live in. It’s what an estate agent might call “bijoux”. It still has a stove, a fridge, a sink, a bed - it’s just that you can only use one of these things at any one time. But, on the plus si...