What next?Glad you asked. Well, we have finally figured it out.
We are going toleave our beloved truck in the capable hands of friends. Our Spanish dog with the Czech microchip floating around in his neck will stay in Europe with other friends. Good to have friends huh. We will jump on a plane and fly around the world. Easy huh. Dang, why didn’t we do this sooner. We have been talking about this for years and are finally doing it. We found some amazing tickets.We have friends and family to see in places that it is cost-prohibitive to bring the truck to. We need to re-establish our foundations before we continue on in our truck. We do belong somewhere in the world. We just haven’t seen those places in a very long time. Our kids need to touch homebase. We need to touch homebase before we continue on. We think the next stage with the truck will be especially difficult so we need to get things together a bit more before we continue on.
So, here is the plan.
We are going to fly into NYC on the 19th of September and make our way around the states for the next 3 months to be with family and friends. Paying special attention to seeing our oldest 2 children in Texas and my parents and sisters in Oregon. We will be in Oregon for Christmas. This is very important to my mum. She has no less than 10 big boxes of Christmas decorations she brings out every Christmas.
On the 12th of January we will fly to New Zealand. Hopefully, with all 5 kids. Only my two oldest kids have been there when they were babies. Our kids hold New Zealand passports and don’t know it at all.
On the 2nd of April we will fly to Sydney, Australia. On the 5th of April we fly to Perth, Australia. In Perth we have Andrew’s family. The kids are frequently bringing it to my attention that they have cousins that they have never met there.
On the 6th of May we fly to Hong Kong and then train across to Beijing. China is very difficult, if not impossible to bring the truck into so this is the Asia stop we chose to experience China and possibly to open doors for a return trip in our truck.
On the 23rd of May we fly back through London to Germany to our dear truck and join a convoy around Germany and then on through Turkey to Asia and North Africa.
How is that for an itinerary?A great challenge will be to keep the costs down as we will be more vulnerable without our big truck.We plan to travel with a small, portable kitchen, sleeping bags, pads and some small tents.Some friends in the U.S. are trying to get us an RV to travel around in.
All very exciting and scary. The kids have already begun to pack. To be perfectly honest, I have begun to pack. I am concerned on finishing some things on the truck because we plan on hitting the ground running when we come back to her. We still need to finish our kitchen counter, install our woodstove and build a better platform on the back of the truck so we can take our motorbike out of the kitchen. It makes a great place to sit but kinda gets in the way sometimes.
Hello, I’m the youngest Jonesberries. I’m TJ. Do you see the 3 girls up there on the yellow, blue and green slide? That’s me, Hannah and Abi.
Oh, do you see that yellow and green stripy slide. That’s the best slide. We call it the toilet bowl . That is Alana on it. She has the family record for going around the toilet bowl the most times. She went around 5 times. Dad tried all day to beat Alana’s record but he could only do 4. The big orange slide is really cool too. Well, I think so.
At the beginning of the day, I was too scared to go on any of the slides ,except for the little blue slide at the other side of the park. At the end of the day I did all of the slides.
Oh, did I remind you this was my 8th birthday party.
TJ has been having a great birthday. We had to do alot of driving on the actual day so we did as we do so many times when we cant fit everything in and have made TJs birthday 3 days long. So, on the day we drove alot while the girls watched a movie on the computer and ate popcorn.
We arrived at a very special campground and waterpark. Yeah! a waterpark. Bright colours and lots of slides and water. We decided to wild camp, as the campground is really expensive, when you count how many people we are. They want to charge the same for all the kids and adults. We will come back in for a full day of playing in the waterpark. Some of our friends, Ales and Karim, have come with us so that makes it a birthday party. TJ has been to pools with slides but never a waterpark. This is TJs big birthday gift – a birthday party at a waterpark.
The wild camping was great. Karim found it. We are just north of Tagazhout (really nice surfing town) at some ruins on the beach. There were lots of little fishing boats out last night as it was a full-moon which apparently makes for great fishing. Abi and Alana made apple pie.
We all ate it from the tin.
Some other wild campers came up in their van to camp with us last night. Melle is a fashion designer. Very cool clothes but a bit fancy for me. She has been living in her van for 5 years and has fixed it up real nice. She doesnt have alot of suff so her van feels really spacious. She sells clothes through her website and her mom sends things out to people. I looked up her website at www.rhizome-fr.com and it doesnt seem to be working right now. Maybe later
It was a great nite. We had great food, great friends and even a guard dog that loyally sat outside our truck all night. When it got dark, Karim made a huge bonfire – as he loves to do and we finished off the night with some jamming.
So, lost another post to the trials of Ecto. You see I have sort of a love hate relationship with Ecto. Anyway, not much lost just my moaning mum stuff as 2 of my kids fly the nest in the same week.
The night before the flight to London the nearby river overflowed and took the path of least resistance down the road in front of the mechanics. In the middle of the night people were climbing over the wall and tow ropes were hauling cars in from the road as the river took over. In the morning what was left was some destroyed fish carts littering the street and sludge everywhere. We put on our welly boots, Sam took our boots back in a bucket as we jumped in our… taxi.
Lizzy is taking off to Texas to hang with Jessica, our amazing, wonderful Woman friend (notice the capital “W” for woman which I reserve for only my favourite women in the world) who we love.
This is a photo of our first leg of the journey. Lizzy’s first hitchhiking experience. Actually we were waiting for a taxi to the airport and some of our friends saw us and gave us a ride in their big blue horsebox.
The rest of her trip was a bit more normal with planes and trains. Well, maybe not that orthodox as we flew ryan air to London. Every time we fly ryan air we say NEVER AGAIN but we always get drawn in by the illusion of cheap prices. We did get free entertainment on the plane this time. With a handful of drunks, an angry primadonna with a huge carryon and a man with a lost boarding card.
Sam, Donald and Alana took off for Scotland. The only drama we heard this time came from Alana. Dear Alana, Andrew drilled and drilled them in the taxi on the way but her carefree attitude, optimism and lack of extensive funds were no match for the near impossible border control in london and she was denied entry. She is now in a detainment centre in London – Ramada with bars – waiting for the next flight to Morocco in 2 days. Not sure if she will continue on with us or what. So, this time our clan got to provide the drama. Ahhh life.
Miracle of miracles Sam and Donald got in. I guess they had to let Donald in because he holds a british passport. Samuel, however, well, he did try. He put on all clean, all black, clothes that promptly got really dirty as we are presently living in a mechanics backyard. You see, miracles do happen in the modern day.
I AM feeling much better. Glad you missed my empty nest moan and groan. It was very sad and I am sure would have brought you all to tears.
Now we are all thinking, North or South. Do we continue south towards the Sahara or do we high tail it North. Hmmmmm, you know we do have sandmats proudly displayed at the back of our truck. We also have a large group of new friends gathering in Sidilfni preparing for Mauritania and beyond. There are visas to get and a carnet to figure out if we go further south.
The Mauritania visa is near impossible to get in U.K. Once you go to the Mauritanian Embassy, London website that has no clue to the Embassy’s closure until you take the long trek and knock on the stranger’s door where the embassy is supposed to be. If you probe deeper online they say to go to the French embassy where they say send in lots of paper and wait 4 months and they might say yes. Seems the thing to do is go to Rabat, Morocco and you get it in 5 hours. You know, you try to set things in order before you get on the road but I think it takes a leap of faith. Jump on out there and the answers come along the way. Oh no, there I go again with one of my rants. STOP ME PLEASE!
You know alot adds up if I havent blogged for a while.
Ahhh. Africa. We love Africa. What to say where to start. We are in love. Even in the first day we felt overwhelmed and could fill a book with what we saw and felt. I will try to just show you some highlights of our outside journey and later the journey of our hearts is sure to come out.
After gazing out at Africa from different points in Spain we finally decided to take the plunge and go. When I was writing an email to my sister I realized that after so looking forward to going to Morocco I was kinda afraid. Silly really. Fear of the unknown I suppose. Terribly embarrassing for someone travelling full time to admit but there you go. I think it is one thing to talk about going to Africa for the first time, overland, with a truck full of children and teenagers. It is completely another thing to get on the ferry. So we got enough money in our account to book our ferry, with a little extra for petrol and food. Went to exit 112, found Carlos and bought our half price ferry tickets. While we were at the Lidl parking lot for the night, with the other motorhomes, who saw Carlos and were waiting to go to Morocco, we decided to head towards Paradise Valley. We have heard from many sources that Tangier is not the best place to hang around in so Paradise Valley was a good target.
The whole motorhome stampede to get onto the ferry was a far cry from the ferry trips we have had across the channel and to Orkney. It was actually quite funny. These little old men, some quite frail, behind the wheel of their “white plastics”, aggressively shoving into line ahead of another old man in his white plastic. Barely escaping bumping into each other.
We were so excited when we made it to Morocco but then had to wait in line for many more hours to be allowed in. The whole process took us 11 hours. Welcome to Africa? Or, welcome to the white plastic parade.
Actually the “welcome to Africa” came when we were getting off the ferry. Normally when we cross a border Andrew hands the person our wad of passports and the border official seems somewhere between overwhelmed and shocked. Here, when Andrew handed the wad of passports to the official the man looked up with a huge smile with all the other muslim men around. As they saw all the kids and teenagers they were ecstatic, commenting on Andrew’s extreme manhood, having so many kids. lots of energetic verbal and hand gestures. Andrew says, I think I’m going to like Africa.
While we were waiting in line at customs we made many friends. Seems like there is this brotherhood of self-builds and full-time travellers. We met a polish/french family in a semi-converted blue horsebox. We also met a dutch man with a self-conversion, it is sort of a caravan on the back of a mercedes van cab full of 9 hippies at the border. They were dancing around the other vehicles and singing and flute playing at the border. They were going to Paradise Valley too. They were going to a rainbow gathering there.
Perfect, we made ourself a convoy. We didnt know about the Rainbow Gathering there before but going to our first Rainbow is one of our goals for this year as we have so many friends that have been and have almost gone so many times ourselves.
We had a great time along the way. We learned about living on the road, raw food, african culture.
On one of our stops along the way Abi and Rachel went out to sit outside. Rachel (from the Hippievan) is a British anthropologist and speaks French, Arabic and Berber. Rachel was kind enough to translate Abi’s first 2 marriage proposals of the day.
A little later we stopped at a ladies cooperative that made argan oil. What a great experience! Apparently the oil is quite sought after for cooking tagines and skin care. The Argan oil comes from a tree that is similar to the olive tree but only grows in this valley. We got to have a go at grinding the oil and met some wonderfully friendly ladies. We were invited to move in with the berber woman on the left. This is also where Abi got her third marriage proposal of the morning.
I really, really like the berber people. I really, really like the villages here.
We also enjoyed the mint tea along the way. We were taught how to pour a proper mint tea. Donald is demonstrating here. You have the mint leaves and green tea and too much sugar in the pot. Pour the contents of the pot into the glasses from various heights. Pour the tea back into the cups. Repeat 3 times. Mmmmm. This is what they are drinking everywhere. Actually, the streets are lined with men leisurely drinking mint tea while their wives are…. where are the wives… I think they are home cooking or at the “Hamam”.
The Hamam. Now, I dont have any pictures of the Hamam seeing that it is a Bath house. It is where the women go in one side and the men the other. You walk into a room of mostly naked people with buckets of water and scrub each others backs with black soap and a scratchy mit. After your hamam the men go for a cup of mint tea and the women go…. I guess home. I know it sounds quite bizarre but we had a great time. The girls loved it. I really enjoyed being in this friendly all woman environment. When me and the girls came out of the hamam there was Andrew waiting across the street… with his mint tea.
Anyways, when we got to Paradise Valley, on the night of the full moon, the energetic teenagers left for the Rainbow gathering that night to walk by moonlight but us more sensible ones stayed at Mohammed’s for a night and walked the next morning.
We rented a couple of donkeys to help with some of the bags.
It was supposed to take us 2 1/2 hours but having small children it took us about 4 hours and we arrived right before dark. It was actually a stunning walk full of old villages, waterfalls, colourful people and goats.
When we got to the rainbow gathering there were about 50 people in a valley that is – well – it IS called paradise valley. We think it was well named.
Andrew is having a great time. There are interesting truck/homes wild camping everywhere. This particular group was mostly german and dutch.
So where are we now? After talking to Mohammed and a few of the other people there for the night we decided to go to Aourir. It is next to Agadir. We found Hassan and are staying with the other full-time travellers, mostly french, in the parking lot while we get work done on our trucks. We have a huge list of things to get done. They have already rebuilt our muffler and are working on opening our roof. It was part of the original plans for our truck before we got it and the truck has been leaking where the two pieces of the roof overlap. We couldn’t afford to get it done in Europe and the work here is really good, fast and cheap. Add to that to be able to be with some great people as the work is being done.
We went to Agadir one day to the Souk (Market). Wont be making that mistake again. Way too touristy and touristy here means you get hassled alot. We really like the villages so much more.
Oh yeah, language-wise. If you hang out in the cities French is great, villages Arabic is better, really rural they only speak Berber.
Anyways, hope you are feeling a bit more caught up. Sorry, havent shared some of our more heart experiences but, to be perfectly honest we are still processing.
We have finally left Portugal. I know, I know, but we love it there. So anyways, here we are outside Gibraltar. We have been wild camping with about 30 campervans etc. We were in this big dirt parking lot right next to the border crossing. Kinda surreal actually. We were in Spain, La Linea de la Conception. We were carrying our passports so we could go back and forth from “Little Britain” (Gibraltar) to Spain. Gibraltar was great for some tastes of where we have been calling home before starting our journeys this time. Elizabeth went to Morrisons and filled a bag with malt loaf. Andrew took some of us to a pub and we had chips and cheese. Samuel, Donald and Alana were busy til late evening going back and forth from country to country. Me and Abi found some insulin and even a place to get a blood test done for her diabetes for just 9.90 OK, not as much fun as malt loaf but necessary. Hannah is just happy to have some more famous 5 books from the second hand bookstore.
Once you cross the border you walk or drive across the airport runway, through a tunnel and into, well, a great big duty-free street. I must say, we were a bit disappointed with the amount of English books. Maybe our expectations were a bit high. We did find a good second hand book store in a cake shop. We did have a good time.
We made lots of new friends. Full-timers, like us. Pen has lived on the road for years and is sporting a van conversion of his own creation.
Pen took off 5 years ago with some friends for one year. After one month he realized he wanted to do this full-time, went back long enough to sell his house and is living off the interest. It is just him and 2 stray dogs he adopted in Spain. “Boss” and “Wife” took off in the big green bus one month ago with 5 big dogs and her daughter, “Child” (10 years old). She became instant friends with TJ and Hannah. Here they are sporting their “best friend hats” they found at a Chinese shop.
Boss’s wife had cancer a couple of years back and after chemo realized she had strayed far from her teenager dream of travelling full-time. When her hair grew back in curly instead of straight she cut it into a mohawk and started to make plans to start travelling with her daughter. As far as wild camping, well, we are coming to the conclusion that Spain seems to always be hard. After 3 days in La Linea we were moved on by the police. I tell you in 10 minutes everyone was gone. All except 2 motorhomes. One of the remaining motorhomes had a blown engine and the second motorhome had the new engine for the first on their trailer. It is strange. Portugal seems to be quite accepting of wild campers as they spend money locally. France and Germany provide special low cost camping but Spain. It is SO HARD to bring a motorhome here. Campgrounds are really expensive and wild camping is really difficult. We are meeting more and more people with some experience on the road who skip through Spain as quickly as possible. They jump from Southwest France and plan their trip perfect so they can be in Portugal by the next evening. If they want to go further south they go to the south of Portugal and skip, as quickly as possible, to Morocco via Algeciras (where the cheap ferries are).
We have now left the Gibraltar area and are in Tarifa. We have just spent one night in a campground. Taking showers, washing clothes, charging electricity. After being overwhelmed at my big bags of laundry I have decided that small and decentralized is better. Just like our trash. When we first started out we accumulated big bags of trash that were hard to get rid of. We switched to small plastic carrier bags. Problem solved. So, applying the same principle to our laundry. Everyone will keep a pillow case in their locker for their dirty clothes and they will be responsible for it themselves. Dispersed and personal. If this doesn’t work we will have to try something else.
Unfortunately it rained the whole time so we were at this campground, huddled in our motorhome, walking through a lake, that had formed outside our truck to get anywhere. We did get to hang out and watch movies with our ample electricity.
Today was Hannah’s 12th birthday. It was a day filled with joy, happiness and drifting with tasty smells of chicken and banana cake. The Jones family tradition consists of the birthday person getting to choose the food that they want for breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc. Hannah chose English Breakfast, tuna sandwiches, banana and chocolate milkshakes, Lemon and Thyme chicken, passionfruit Sumol and Banana cake with chocolate fudge frosting. What she didnt ask for is the special candles that kept relighting themselves. She got lots of great gifts including a nano, rain poncho, a very cool bag that Edna made, and a plastic teaset from Paulo that the boys were also enjoying.
Over the weekend Alana’s family brought her back after getting her visa renewed. They also brought Steff with them. We had a great weekend together. We were 19 all together. Lots of cooking and talking and laughing. We had some great food together. Of course, the Hurst family came laden with all sorts of good food including a banana cake, homemade bread and pasta. Once again, the Hurst family loving great food almost as much as sharing it. Abigail made some great puddings for Sunday (Wacky cake and a Portuguese Cookie cake). The cookie cake tasted great but didnt hold its shape too well – we’ll need to try that one again. Apparently it is the first cake that young portuguese girls learn to make …. hmmmm. Of course, we also had “Paulo’s Drunken Chicken”. Andrew was quite proud of his chicken and the fact that he could cook 4 chickens at the same time. Portuguese chicken is so great. They arent nearly as big as other countries but the taste of those little yellow flesh chickens, mmmmm. Anyways, when they left they took Peter (from Germany) with them. We have had such a good time with Peter. Peter, our multi-talented friend.
While gathering sticks for making Didgeridoos he found a smaller stick and used it to teach Lizzy how to make a rainstick. He taught “circular breathing” to Sam and Donald so they could play didgeridoo.
He had an impressive collection of Freakstock wristbands. He went up to Lisbon with the Hursts and then will go up to Porto to Paulo’s other tattoo parlor.
We will miss Peter and his gentle heart, wise words and good teaching and and and.
The rain and wind swirled around us all night. The sun came out this morning. I was so happy I ran around taking pictures of everyone. Ever feel like doing that? Capturing a moment? A snapshot.
Gee, what a surprise. Lizzy is in the truck playing the sax. She is jamming to beatles songs. She has been enjoying doing this so much lately that she has numb lips at the end of each day.
Abi and TJ are cooking flapjacks in the house. MMMMM it smells great.
Hannah learned how to crochet yesterday. She slept with it last night and woke up crocheting this morning.
Dang, those boys are still sleeping in their tent.
I am rushing around taking photos of unsuspecting people.
Andrew is on his computer putting the world to rights and comforting friends.
How is this moment for you?
Flapjacks are done. Edna came in to share a coffee.
Had a great New Years eve celebration at Paulo and Edna’s house. We have taken our minds off the difficulties of the last week. We had no vehicle for days as Serge’s car broke, days later Paulo and Edna’s van broke, days later we arrived in our truck and after picking up Petr from the Airport got our dear Maggie stuck. Yes, I know, our overlander truck. Yes, our 4×4 truck. Add to this the fact that our truck is leaking and Paulo and Edna’s house is leaking. As a matter of fact we were thinking we would celebrate New Years by candlelight because the water is leaking into the walls and making it unwise to use electricity in parts of the house.
On the last day of the year Paulo and Edna’s van got fixed! They rushed off to the grocery store.
We had spent several days doing various “teambuilding exercises” that some people would pay dear money for.
We dug trenches, with our small foldable shovel, and made small roads for each wheel with buckets and buckets of stones we collected from around the land. We all carefully watched the wheels while andrew figured out the “locking differential” system. The sun had come out briefly and we were feeling determined to not go into the new year with a bogged truck. Slowly she climbed out of the mirey clay.
Just a half an hour later we took “Maggie” out to take Sam and Donald to the train station so they could go to a party in Lagos with Eddie and Rubin (from Conscious Earth). We also used this opportunity to go grocery shopping. Get the idea there wasnt much food in the house.
A little later we stopped at a ladies cooperative that made argan oil. What a great experience! Apparently the oil is quite sought after for cooking tagines and skin care. The Argan oil comes from a tree that is similar to the olive tree but only grows in this valley. We got to have a go at grinding the oil and met some wonderfully friendly ladies. We were invited to move in with the berber woman on the left. This is also where Abi got her third marriage proposal of the morning.
We also enjoyed the mint tea along the way. We were taught how to pour a proper mint tea. Donald is demonstrating here. You have the mint leaves and green tea and too much sugar in the pot. Pour the contents of the pot into the glasses from various heights. Pour the tea back into the cups. Repeat 3 times. Mmmmm. This is what they are drinking everywhere. Actually, the streets are lined with men leisurely drinking mint tea while their wives are…. where are the wives… I think they are home cooking or at the “Hamam”.
It was supposed to take us 2 1/2 hours but having small children it took us about 4 hours and we arrived right before dark. It was actually a stunning walk full of old villages, waterfalls, colourful people and goats.
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