About this website

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David and Susan Bratt
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Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2005 9:11 pm

About this website

Post by David and Susan Bratt »

About This Website

In the late summer of 2008, my wife and I plan to ship our RV from the East Coast to Belgium for a 60-day trip through western Europe. We’ll then store it in Amsterdam and return to it next spring for a 90-day trip. We plan to repeat this cycle for as many years as it takes for us to decide we’ve had enough of it. Then we’ll ship it back to the US.
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Our RV is a 2001 Class C Born Free 24RB named Rover. We are David and Susan. We’ve just retired from untold decades of work at a mid-sized public university in Minnesota.
This website will document the trip we’re planning and keep track of what happens to our various expectations about it: which ones are exceeded, which met, which shattered.

When they hear our plans, some people say, “Oh, what a wonderful idea.”
Others say something else, the subtext of which is “You’re crazy.”
And nearly everyone asks one or more of the following

FAQs

Why an RV?
Because we think it will give us a different kind of experience of Europe than we’ve had in the past. And we think it will allow us to afford being in Europe for more than a couple of weeks.
Once upon a time, we did a 6-week train-hotel-rental-car-hotel whirlwind tour of five countries in Europe. That was before the dollar went into the tank and children staked their claims on all our discretionary spending. So until recently, travel to Europe was out of the question. But then four years ago, we went to northern Italy for a week in March and also joined a bus tour group following the last two weeks of the Tour de France in July. We'd also begun taking students to London a number of times for 10 days or so.
On all these trips, we stayed in tourist hotels and ate all our meals at restaurants, which proved to be expensive. When even a spartan tourist hotel room costs $200 a night and a meal is $30 for anything better than a Big Mac, it became obvious that we couldn’t afford to spend much time in Europe that way. And unless we were willing to take on the added expense of a rental car, this sort of travel limited us to the big city we were in and to locales no more than a day trip away by train.
In that last respct, the Tour de France experience was different in that, unlike most of our other trips, the bus that took us from place to place gave us a chance to relax in small French towns. However, a disadvantage to the trip was that with thirty other people on the bus, we couldn’t follow our own schedule.
Then we read Ron and Adele Milavsky’s Take Your RV to Europe. Like them, we hope that traveling in an RV would address these shortcomings. We also hope it will give us a chance to get away from the standard tourist itinerary and to meet Europeans who don’t spend their workdays dealing with tourists. And we think using an RV will mean we can afford to stay in Europe for months at a time instead of days.

Won’t it be expensive to ship? Why not rent a European RV?
It's costing us about $4500 to ship Rover to Zeebrugge, Belgium, plus about $600 for the gas and campsite charges to get it halfway across the country from Minneapolis to the Port of Baltimore. In the high season, it would cost more than $1000 a week to rent a European RV that’s roughly comparable to an American Class C like Rover. In this first 2-month trip, then, we will more than make up for this cost. (However, this doesn’t include insurance, which deserves its own discussion.)

Isn’t gas much more expensive in Europe?
As I write this in June, gas in France is about $8.00 a gallon, and Rover gets about 10 mpg on a really good day. If we were driving on US interstates 400 miles a day, we’d run out of money very quickly, even at $4 per gallon. But things are much closer in Europe: Amsterdam to Marseille is less than 900 miles, and if we ever do get that far and back, it will take us 3 months to do it. The gas for that distance will be about $1400; Rover could go 3500 miles for that amount in the US: many RV tourists in this country would rack up that distance in the same three months.

Aren’t American RVs too big for European cities?
A 40’ Class A motorhome with slide-outs probably would be too big, not just for some of the roads but for the campground spaces as well. But Rover is only 24’ long and has no slide-outs (we've read that many European campgrounds prohibit them, in any case).

Doesn’t Europe run on 220-240 volt electrical instead of the US’s 110-120?
Yes. So we had Rover's generator removed and installed a step-down transformer in its place, and we bought a collection of adaptors for the myriad of plugs that European countries use. The adaptors will connect the European 220-volt shore power source to our cable; the cable will connect to the step-down transformer’s input; the transformer will convert 220 volts of input into 110 volts output; and the 30-amp cable that came with our RV will run between the transformer’s output plug and Rover’s 110-volt shore power plug-in point.
We also replaced the RV manufacturer’s stock battery charger with a Xantax converter/charger. The converter function will convert the house batteries’ 12-volt power to 110-120 volts, so we are not dependent on shore power for our 110-volt needs. And we also bought two Interstate Freedom AGM batteries to serve as our 12-volt house power source, because they're advertised as being able to keep their charge for months at a time, without requiring periodical recharges: and that's what they'll have to do during the 7-9 months we'll have the RV in storage in Europe between our visits.

.Things They Don't Tell You

1. Propane reproduces itself, which makes it impossible to empty the LPG tank, even if you run the furnace nearly full time for days on end. This can present problems if your shipping company wants the tank to be empty: ours did, of course, and apparently so do all the others.

2. US Customs in Baltimore requires that the RV arrive at the port in time to allow four full working days before departure. (At least that's what our agent told us to explain why our RV had been bumped from the ship departing on August 11. Up until then, the most she'd said was "Oh, the shippers like to have it there four days before." Note the difference between "US Customs requires" and "the shippers like to.")
Rover 2002 24ft RB

www.ourtravelswithrover.com
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