This year, Wendy’s Biological Parents are flying over from Australia to join us for our Summer trip across Europe.

We have decided on 3 places that we will definitely stop at, Paris, Venice and Pisa. Keeping these in mind, we planned a rough route for this years trip.

Having a route is all fine and well, but Carole and Daniel need transport. Do they hire or purchase?

As we looked into hiring a car, we considered all types of cars. Essentially, as we wanted to go on a few off road routes, a 4×4 would be best suited. Hiring a car would cost anything upwards of £3k. The price got steeper because we were not simply going to Western Europe, we also wanted to go to Montenegro and Croatia, which is outside Europe. This increased the insurance price on the hire. The other insurance raising aspect was Carole & Daniel having an Australian drivers licence.

Would it not be better to purchase a car and sell it after the holiday?

Could we insure a car for them if they bought one? So we started with insurance. We found only a handful of insurers would insure someone on a foreign licence, specifically an Australian licence. Direct Line, Norwich Union and a few short term insurance brokers were the only insurers that we found who would add a foreign licence onto a plan.

Now we know that it’s possible to insure them, we need to find a car!

We were a little anxious as buying a car for someone else is a difficult task…what if something goes wrong with the car while we are away? And so we looked at everything from a Toyota Hilux to a Mitsubishi Pajero. The later being the car we finally decided upon and purchased.

It was not all plain sailing, we experienced some insurance issues. First Wendy’s no claims came into question, then terms and conitions were changed and foreign licences no longer covered. This ended up in us having to cancel 2 policies and take out short term insurance to cover us during the holiday.

Transport organised and so we moved onto the smaller items on the agenda. We will still be camping, and as we have many tents, Carole and Daniel will be using our ‘family’ sized tent and have Cassie in with them. Dan and I will sleep in our 2 man tent. We will need camping mats, camp chairs and all the car requirements for driving in the European countries: triangle, high vis jackets, breathalyzer, and fire extinguisher.

Along with organising equipment for people coming from another country, we identified some extra things that we require this year.

To start off, we decided to purchase a roof tent. After much research by Dan, we settled on a tent from MyWay.

We also purchased more boxes and a hi-lift jack.

All that’s left now is to count down till Carole and Daniel arrive and we can start our holiday.