Wandergliding: October 2025

October 8^th-27^th, 2025

My Wandergliding adventure this year is to head to England, buy a campervan, and tour around the west coast of France, Spain, Portugal and hopefully even Morocco. Naomi plans to meet up with me for her 16-day holiday in Portugal, a country that neither one of have visited before. I’ve only briefly been in Spain too, just in Granada to visit Alhambra.

I took the train from Heathrow down to Weymouth where my Aunt Shirley lives. Over the next 2-3 weeks, the plan was to try and find a campervan, get it prepped and head to mainland Europe to meet Naomi in Lisbon on November 6^th. During that time, I would be able to hang out with my aunt, my two cousins and their families.

Before arriving in England, I had been scouring Facebook Marketplace and a few other websites to get an idea of what kind of vans were out there, and for what price. On October 8^th, the day I arrived in England, I saw a van that had just been listed which had a giant octopus painted on both sides of the vehicle, crushing some small boats. While perusing the ad, I noticed an octopus in the Search textbox on the Windows toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Turns out it was “World Octopus Day”. A few days later, I was playing a game called Codenames (great game by the way) and Octopus came up as a card for our team. How serendipitous!

One of the photos in the ad for the van:

I reached out to the owner Ben and didn’t hear back for a few days, but it turns out he was on holidays. He was gracious enough to bring the van over to Auntie Shirley’s place so I could take a look at it. It ticked off a lot of my boxes: a raised roof to able to stand up inside, a basic kitchen, a full-time bed so I wouldn’t be making and unmaking my bed everyday, a solar panel that would make it off-grid and a toilet and shower would be a plus.

The interior:

After a tour by Ben followed by a quick test drive, I decided to make an offer on the van that evening and Ben agreed to it. Sweet! I decided that I would name the van “Octi”. In 2010, after I quit my IT job, I bought a Ford Transit van in England. Since it was a Ford, I decided to call it “Betty”, after Betty Ford, the wife of the former US president, who founded the Betty Ford Centre to help those with addictions as she had her struggles with alcohol and prescription medication. I figured that the van might drive me to drink…and it sure did! It was quite the lemon and in the end a lovely French couple helped me change the entire diesel engine over a week and a half in their backyard. Then I purchased Betty 2.0 in New Zealand, and that was a great van but I lost a fair amount of money selling it at the end of my travels as Covid 19 was just kicking in. Let’s hope Octi is a winner!

Octi!

I had already been in contact with the one and only insurance company, Sterling, that I could find that would insure a foreigner for 6 months. Sadly, there was no deduction applied to the rate for my 40 years of driving experience, and since I had no other choice, I had to bite the bullet. Six months was going to cost me 1080 pounds, or almost $2000! Yikes! My cousin’s husband told me that he pays around 300 pounds for a full year.

After sending Ben the money, he transferred ownership to me. The next hoop to jump through was to pay for my Road Tax. In England, you pay a fee for driving on the roads. Makes sense to me, however, a few things irked me about it. First off, it was middle of October, and the road tax is backdated to the start of the month so I’m paying for 2 weeks that I didn’t even own the van. Next, I could only purchase either 6 months or 1 year. I plan to come back to England around the start of March to have about a month to sell the van before flying back to Canada and should I sell it say, March 6^th, I will still have to pay for all of March in road taxes, as would the new owner…feels like double dipping by the government. Additionally, I plan to drive maybe 2-3 weeks in England out of that time. It seems like a hefty price to pay (6 months is about 180 pounds or $330).

Next, the “MOT” (the Ministry of Transport) of a vehicle is a yearly inspection that a certified garage must do to ensure that the vehicle is safe to drive on the roads. Ben had an MOT done last February, but that meant that I might be returning to England with an expired MOT, which is illegal. Remarkably, I found a garage that could do the check the following day, however.

Sadly, Octi failed the MOT! It needed a couple of little things, like a headlight adjustment which the garage did and a new windshield wiper which I replaced but it also required a new boot, known as a “gaiter” in the UK, on the steering rack. I brought Octi in the following week and left 200 pounds poorer…oh well, it had to be done.

Okay, enough bitching on that subject. Buying and selling a van when travelling abroad always has some extra costs.

Meanwhile, I had almost 3 lovely weeks hanging out with Auntie Shirley, my two cousins and their families. On the weekends almost everyone came and stayed at Shirley’s house and we went for numerous walks, visited a botanical garden, played games and enjoyed some lovely meals. Shirley and I got addicted to the show “Traitors” and plowed through the first season in short order.

On one of our many walks with the dogs.

That's high energy Rico in the foreground, and more relaxed Nala in the background.

The youngest of the five kids (one cousin has 3 girls, the other one 2) put on a few plays for the rest of us. There was some good, unintentional, comedy in them such as a ghost stealing the soul of one character in the form of a crumpled piece of paper, only to accidentally drop it on the floor!