And Home…

We set off on May 19th to attempt to visit every country in the European Union and climb the highest peak in each one. We arrived back on September 16th, to the view of The White Cliffs of Dover, having driven 16,204 miles. We didn’t quite achieve our goal, but did mange to visit every EU country except Cyprus, and climb 25 out of 28 of the highest points (Mont Blanc counts for two). The bar chart below shows the relative heights of each of the 28 high peaks. Denmark is the lowest at 171m and Italy/France are the highest at 4811m.

Part way through our journey we decided to leave Mont Blanc for another year. We didn’t feel that we had the required expertise to climb it alone and we didn’t fancy spending the ~€2,000 each to hire a guide for an attempt. With Mont Blanc delayed and therefore no prospect of completing them all within the year, we also decided there was little need to fly out to Cyprus to tick Mount Olympus off the list. So watch this space for the final two peaks!

Here are some statistics from our European roadtrip:

• We were away for 121 days (3 months and 29 days).

• This was mostly spent living in the 9.12 meters squared internal area of the van.

• We spent 6 nights in paying campsites ( 2 x Ireland, 1 x Barcelona, 1 x Zadar, 1 x Hungary, 1 x Gstad).

• We spent 22 nights “indoors”, 5 of these were mountain huts on the way up or down peaks.

• Our average daily expenditure each was £27.87 which was in our budget of £1000 a month.

• The biggest cost was fuel, our total expenditure can be seen broken down into categories in the pie chart below.

• We used 1760.2L of diesel, the van used an average of 41.68 miles per gallon which equated to an average cost of £0.13 per mile.

• We purchased fuel in 19 different countries with the cost per litre of fuel displayed in the bar chart below. Bulgaria had the cheapest fuel at £1.03 per litre and Norway the most expensive, £1.40 a litre. The UK had the fourth most expensive fuel.

• We visited a Lidl supermarket in 19 different EU countries, you can buy olive pasta sauce in all of them!

• The “special aisle” is similar in all Lidls e.g. angle grinders, fake croc shoes etc, but the “foreign food aisle” which is usually Spanish in UK Lidls differs country to country.

• The underwear sold in Aldi are more comfortable than that sold in Lidl.

The main reason our daily expenditure was so low was not paying for accommodation. We used an app called Park4Night which is used by the van community to identify good places to stop overnight and where certain facilities are; like water, toilets, bins, etc. The comments section of these sites is very useful to work out if people have been moved on by police, received fines or had their vans broken into.

We definitely found that some countries were easier to “wild camp” in than others. For example France often has areas run by the local community which have free toilets. We also stayed in a small town in Slovenia where the community had provided 6 parking spaces with free water and electricity. The Scandinavian countries also had a large variety of facilities including campfire areas with wood and compost toilets.

All in all despite this feeling at some points like a box ticking exercise and hitting a few bumps in the road we had a great time and were glad to have visited such amazing places.