Born Free Leap'n Lions RV Club Info & Discussion Forum

Uploading the blog is increasingly a problem for us. When we were in Pompei we had wireless access at our site but apparently wiped out our website trying to load it. We walked all over town asking at big hotels and tourist offices where we might find strong “wifi” and finally ended up trying Burger...

April 28 Travel is supposed to be broadening: the traveler visits strange lands, hears new sounds, observes unfamiliar customs, and emerges from the experience refreshed, enlightened, more appreciative of the variety of ways people may organize their lives together. And so we have nearly always foun...

A few months ago we heard Minnesota humorist Kevin Kling read from some of his stories. One of them gave us our tag line for this year. When asked if his bus driving job was boring because he drove the same route day after day, the driver replied ,“Not a day goes by when I don’t say ‘Well, shoot, I ...

We drove 255 miles in light rain to get through Naples and all the way to Pompei. We are in the Spartacus Campground, a little place with tiny sites. We have other campers within ten feet of us in three directions, but it is in a great location, literally just a few hundred feet from the exit of the...

April 22 We decided to stay an extra day at the campground above Innsbruck. They had wonderful new facilities, excellent wifi connection, and an easy bus into the city. But instead of a relaxing day, we, of course, walked five miles and exhausted ourselves hitting the high spots. The Tyrolian Folk M...

We spent a day and a half parked behind the tire store in Wörgl without incident. We saw no one, and probably no one knew we were there. There was no light at night at all. On Sunday morning we went to a packed Catholic church service (since we had much to be thankful for!) It was first communion fo...

This was one of those days we have been secretly waiting for--the “what if something really awful happens” kind of day. It’s Saturday. We had just stopped at the last service area in Germany to purchase our “vignette” that allows us to travel in Austria and automatically collect tolls. We were less ...

April 16 Always excited to be on our way again, we had forgotten what jet lag feels like and how heavy our luggage could be. It is a simple thing to prepare for a road trip when your motorhome is sitting in your driveway. It is altogether another thing to take everything with you, all at once, out t...

Things we have learned Special K comes in chocolate. So does nearly everything else. Adults don’t wear bike helmets. People drink beer and wine before lunch time. We’d give anything to find a Starbucks. The British WWI cemeteries are immaculately kept up. Peanut butter is hard to find; most of it co...

It takes a while to add things up: recovering from jet lag, going through an 18” pile of mail, doing laundry, just trying to make sense of all our notes. We were pleased to discover that our expenses were very close to our estimates. We drove 5247 miles through The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Ital...

On our way back to Amsterdam we stopped for two nights in Ghent, Belgium. The campground is part of a huge sporting complex, with playing fields, a stadium, and parks, and would have been easy to get to if the signs had been less ambiguous. But instead we took a little side trip through the busy cit...

Our campground in Verdun was probably the best one so far. It had everthing we needed, including free and good internet access and a wide paved boulevard that made it very easy to get into and out of our site. It was about a 20 minute walk into the town. Verdun is a small, quite depressed town, desp...

Sometimes in this life we receive gifts that we don’t expect and can probably never repay. One such was the wonderful gift of hospitality we were given this past weekend. We had been been corresponding with a couple living in Germany who found our blog and are interested in doing what we are doing, ...

We are amazed that hundreds of European campers don’t die of e coli bacteria every year. We are very careful where and how we get water: we have dedicated fresh water hoses that are not used for anything else. But we regularly find people filling their fresh water tanks from the water hose provided ...

This is the 65th anniversary of D-Day. Many of the French cities we’ve visited have had a street called “(Day) (Month) 1944” or “1945,” subtitled “Day of Liberation of (that city).” These streets and squares, as well as the omnipresent War Memorials on village greens and in churches, are a constant ...