Well as I mentioned earlier in this post, we have been thinking about what we might do this summer.

Actually we have been thinking since last summer. I guess we are probably not alone on this, we tend to think from trip to trip, from day to day, even during a trip. I guess most people who enjoy travelling have this problem. Is it wrong? I don’t want to wish my life away, but I love thinking about possibilities, getting the map out while drinking wine or beer in camp. Is that dreamin?

For us we have been to lots of places in Europe, we still have much of Northern Europe to go and places on our own door step such as Scotland and Ireland, but the weather makes life tricky in those places. We don’t want to be confined, confined to a hotel. We want the option to camp, we like camping. No we are not poor, we just like to get away from it. I camp in hotels all year for work, I really don’t like it. So I guess sooner or later we need to take the plunge and face the weather, before we loose the opportunity to see the places we take for granted on our door step.

This Year’s Itinerary

In the meantime we have been thinking about travel this August. Unfortunately during tourist season, we are bound to this because of school holidays, we tend to get away lightly due to the places we visit, not always. Our plans have been a little hampered this year, domestics are getting in the way! We had to have the kitchen done… I guess you are wondering what the hell I am on. Well it is all about economics. The kitchen cost a fortune (it is still not finished). This has hampered our trip money saving ability.

Ultimately this has meant that, although we have ‘planned’, the plan is more of an ‘aspiration’. Let me explain. I guess what we are saying is that, we refuse to give up the opportunity of our annual trip. Regardless of how far we have saved, we’ll see how far we can go on what we’ve got! So if we don’t know what we will be able to do we should plan for what we’d like to do. So I guess you’d say plan for your aspirations.

So with that explained. We’d like this year to explore some more dirt roads in the Alps, there is a warren up there and plenty of places to wild camp without having to part with Euros. After that we’d also like to explore Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia. These are completely new to us and potentially very exciting.

How we get from the Alps to Albania and the surrounding areas, would either be by road or by sea. We used a ferry last year from Bari to Croatia which made life very easy, but expensive. The easiest ferry option for Albania is from Ancona to Durrës. This costs circa €400 but saves probably about three days in raw driving, that is really more because we stop and take a non direct route. The ferry crossing is around 20 hours. The saving is definitely not in fuel, even in a Land Rover.

Another advantage of getting to Albania from Ancona, is that we can use the days saved to spend more time exploring before heading back, it is probably about 1500 miles (2600 km) to Brighton from there. Which would be about 7 days driving, we’d need to allow about 10 so we could chill a bit. This would leave us about 2 weeks in the area we want to be. In reality I’d hope to be able to build some of the return days into the route to allow us to look at possibly Kosovo, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina a little more.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at every country we aspire to visit this year and posting a bit about sites and areas that have caught our attention. This will hopefully culminate with a rough route plan. Hopefully we’ll be able to research some more Alps routes too.

So stay tuned if you want to know more.