Officially Gone..!!

This is the last blog post that I will be making from Purple Towers......

Anne and I have enjoyed living here but there have been a lot of changes in the area over the past seventeen years, not all of them for the better.
In that respect it is just like any other area I suppose, over time lots of changes that can affect the very character of an area.....

It's been good living so close to the coast....very enjoyable during the spring...summer and autumn months when the weather can be glorious, not so good during the winter months when it can be pretty dismal. 
However, even during the winter months there can be some very special days ideal for a walk along the coast.... We will miss it...

View from Purple Towers - Like most places dismal in the wet.

View at the end of the road - glorious when the sun is out!

The past couple of weeks have been a round of meeting up with friends for farewell dinners and lots of coffee and cake meets as well.......
Now Anne and I are just looking forward to the adventure ahead of us.....

Lots of people have asked us what our exact plans are.....  
I don't do 'exact' but I can tell you what our broad brush plan is though....

My daughter and her husband and my two grandsons are away on holiday in the USA at the moment. 
As Eva the Eriba is currently parked on their drive we are going to house sit whilst they are away and use the time to get everything sorted out and stashed away on board...
Easter will be spent there.......
We will have a practice run at getting the awning erected....better to do it on the drive than make total idiots of ourselves at the first campsite....
Every other bit of equipment will be checked and tried out before we finally head off..

On the tenth of April we will be setting off and heading for Devon.....
We have booked a couple of sites down there and it will give us a chance to catch up with Anne's extended family who all live in the County..

We intend being there until about the end of May when we will continue with our tour.....
UK first and then later on Mainland Europe... 
Exact timings and places are all open.....
we will make it up as we go along....
in other words 'Freedom'.

It's possible we could winter in Southern Spain but again we will just see how it all pans out......
How long will we tour for before finally settling down somewhere back in Devon? 
Again it's all open with no fixed timescale.... probably when we have had enough of touring... 

My next post will be from Eva the Eriba...parked on my daughters drive :-)
I will show you some of the bits of kit connected with the Eriba including the kit for transporting my bikes......

In the meantime as far as Purple Towers is concerned, we are now 'officially gone'!!

Saving the best till last....

Virtually everything has now been removed from Purple Towers and apart from a few small things to sort out, we are almost ready to leave after spending seventeen years of our life here.
Currently we are sitting on camp chairs in an empty room.....well empty apart from the chairs and a television set.... 

Luckily we still have the bed in the bedroom so we have something to sleep on which is good news, as we have just over one week left here whilst we tie up the loose ends.....

There are always mixed emotions when you move on to something or somewhere new....
Over the past seventeen years whilst living here a lot of things have happened in our lives.... Family landmarks...Friends made.....Health scares.....Redundancy....Retirement.....Good and bad decisions made.....Some cycling and walking successes as well as failures........
In short lots and lots of memories which we will be taking with us when we finally close the door on this part of our life's journey.....

This whole project has been over two years in the planning and as we approach our very last week at Purple Towers the excitement of the whole adventure is really starting to build...

Some of the last items to be moved out have been my well loved bikes......  
I have been taking them over to my daughter's house where Eva the Eriba is parked up ready for us to 'hit the road'.

When it came to our moving strategy it really was a case of saving the best till last..!!

Tiffany the Tifosi meeting up with Eva the Eriba....

I never knew it was there.....

Earlier this week I met up with Jason Boynton-Lee for coffee..cake....and a chat..
Jason rode down through France and into Spain with me and a few others back in 2009.... 

It was at the end of that ride after disembarking from the Santander to UK ferry in Plymouth that I had my accident. I came off my bike near Budleigh Salterton waking up in Exeter hospital.......
Jason was one of the first of the other riders on the scene and it is always nice to meet up and have a chat about old times and some of the rides we have done together....

It has to be said that currently I think that Jason is a lot fitter than I am.... Over the last few months he has got back into his cycling as if he is on a mission.......
As we are hoping to meet up for a ride or two once Anne and I get started on our long term adventure trip I think that I will have to put some serious work into my fitness levels just to keep up with him....

Anyway, on the walk back from the coffee shop Jason pointed out a plaque on the wall of St Peter's Church in Bournemouth...........

St Peter's Church- Bournemouth.

It is interesting...but after living in Bournemoth for the last seventeen years I never knew that it was there...
It just goes to show that we can live in an area for many years and yet if we look closely we can always see and learn something new.......

The Plaque that Jason pointed out to me..

Thanks Jason, for reminding me that you don't need to go on the road full time touring to see and learn new and interesting things.....

Boosting my Caravan WiFi Connection....

One of the problems that I have experienced while on long camping trips, is maintaining a good internet connection....
Of course with 3G/4G you can always access the internet with your smart phone if you have a suitable signal.....however that is also a very good way of eating up your data allowance in double quick time.
In the past on trips up to about six weeks such as the trip I did cycling back to the UK from Gibraltar, that is exactly what I did, buying extra data as I went along.

This is perfectly acceptable for those sort of shorter trips, but is not a good idea for much longer trips like the one that Anne and I our starting out on in a few weeks time. 
Also we will be wanting to use laptops...tablets and also a kindle...
At home we connect these devices to the internet via a WiFi router and they work pretty well that way.

When staying at a lot of campsites WiFi is often available free or for maybe a small fee....however the signal is often very patchy and slow around the campsite and very dependent on where on the site your pitch actually is.....
You can quite often see people sat on a wall outside the reception office trying to get a good reliable WiFi connection in order to post to their blog or social media and surf the net.....
I can remember spending a good couple of hours in the toilet area of a campsite in France trying to make a posting on my blog...the toilet area seemed to offer the least troublesome (but not perfect) connection....Not the best place to spend and evening though.....

Now what I wanted for our life on the road was something that would give us (most of the time) a good solid reliable WiFi connection that we can access in the comfort of Eva the Eriba.....
After communicating with others out there already travelling long term in Europe and doing a bit of research myself I was directed to the I-Boost Pro D8 Directional System .........

The I-Boost D8

I have seen and heard lots of good reports for this bit of kit, so I am hoping that it will solve the problem......

According to the information on the website of Motorhome WiFi who market the D8 :-

"The I-Boost D8 serves to both boost the externally available WiFi signal and then repeat that signal at full strength inside your van, creating your own secure network with your own unique security code......
Compatible with I-Pads..Tablets..Smartphones and even Kindles...
There are no drivers to install on the devices and no wires between you and the system..."

I have tried the unit out at home... normally my computer shows that there are 7 available WiFi signals that could be connected to....
With the D8 linked up it shows an available 46 WiFi signals....so it certainly seems to boost and multiply the strength of the WiFi signals....

Once we hit the road I will update you on my real world findings of this bit of kit.....
I have high hopes.....

Even the Toilet Rolls.......

A few weeks ago at the end of January when I posted about picking up Eva the Eriba from the dealers, Steve from the blog DPF Point to Point in the USA, left a comment asking me when Eva would be painted purple...... to which I replied :-

"I won't quite go that far Steve, but I will be adding lots of purple things inside the van like cushions....containers....wine glasses etc".

Well just to reassure Steve that all is going to plan in line with the 'purpletraveller colour chart' here is a photo of the latest items to go into the van,  proving that even the toilet rolls are purple!!

Purple toilet rolls for Eva the Eriba

Far more 'spring like' than the local tip......

Since my last post Anne and I have been really making some headway with our plans for our big adventure...
We have managed to shift out lot's of items of furniture etc....... you really know you are getting on top of it all when the rooms have a bit of an echo....
Even the garage is almost empty and I think that all our trips to the tip and upcycling and recycling organizations is slowly coming to an end.... probably two or three more trips should see it all done...

We seem to have been working on the task of simplifying and removing all the clutter in our lives for ages - we actually started on it back in mid September last year - but we are both feeling the benefits of our decision already, it's like having a weight lifted.

It is really surprising how much STUFF we can accumulate over our lives.
In the past whenever we have moved we have just packed everything up and moved it on to the next house.....we have never had a proper sort out, so over the years the STUFF just grows and grows.
Deciding to go travelling before moving into our next home has been a great opportunity to just get rid of everything..!!

We have both agreed that when we finally stop our travels and settle in Devon we will keep everything simple and will live a more clutter free existence......

Rather than show you an image of the local tip or a charity shop or recycling organization's offices (all of which I seem to have spent a lot of time at recently) I thought that I would leave you with a picture of some snowdrops....far more Spring like........

SNOWDROPS - far more Spring like than the local tip!!

Pop along to Shaftesbury.....

A few days ago I met with Jon Joynes for lunch and a natter..... Jon was one of the team who rode with me on the Ten Countries in Ten Days (10in10) ride back in 2013....
In actual fact Jon is the only one of the riders whom I have cycled with since that adventure.....

It's always nice to meet up with friends, especially if you have shared the adventure of a trip such as the 10in10.....It's almost as if there is a bit of a bond that is formed by the pleasure and pain jointly experienced by all who were in the team.......

Jon and I met up in Shaftesbury in North Dorset.....
Although on this occasion we both travelled to the town by car, I've cycled to Shaftesbury on a number of occasions in the past and it is a great destination for a cyclist.....
One of the reasons is Gold Hill.........
This is the cobbled hill immortalized in the 1973 Hovis Bread TV advert directed by Ridley Scott and it really is a picture-perfect chocolate box scene..........

It's a great hill for a short... hard.... cobbled hill climb........
In Simon Warren's book 'Another 100 Greatest Cycling Climbs he rates it as 7/10. 
On his scale 10 is the hardest........

The thing with attempting this hill, is that because it is a bit of a tourist honey trap you will always become part of the attraction.....tourist eyes will be on you.....watching your every revolution of the pedals.......you dare not fail to reach the top..!!!
Worth a go though!!

When you've completed that..... just head about a mile south of the town and you will come across another hill listed in Simon Warren's book....
This one is the Zig Zag hill and he rated this an easier 4/10....but don't be fooled as it is still an enjoyable and worth while climb for the cyclist hill climber.....

If you are ever in Dorset with your bike........ pop along to Shaftesbury and give those hills a spin.......

Gold Hill - Shaftesbury