Why selling our home to see the world in a vintage motorhome was absolutely the right call – Susan Dalgety
Susan Dalgety’s journeys around the world have provided much evidence that Mark Twain was right when he said travel is ‘fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness’
When the end came, it was almost an anti-climax. On Wednesday, my husband messaged me to say he was on his way to Dundee, and two hours later our vintage motorhome was no longer ours. She had a new, careful owner and all we had left was our memories. Oh, but what memories.
Ten years ago, on September 20, 2016, we set off from our Musselburgh home heading for Hull, looking forward to a year visiting every country in the European Union. We had planned our mammoth road trip before Brexit, and the June vote added an unplanned poignancy to our journey. We could still travel freely between countries with our EU passport, but for how long?
But we almost never made the ferry to Zeebrugge. Two hours into our journey and on a narrow country lane heading to our pit stop for the night, we ended up in a ditch. The van lay on her right-hand passenger side – she’s a left-hand drive – with a farm hedge embedded in her bodywork. We were unhurt, but shaken. Was our dream of freedom, first on the roads of Europe then on America’s highways, about to end before it had even begun?
A fantasy made real
Three days later and we boarded the ferry. The van had suffered nothing more a superficial gash, which a Thornhill garage fixed for what turned out to be a reasonable sum. Neither of us have any technical expertise, and we soon found that while classic Hymer motorhomes are a miracle of German engineering, things can and will go wrong. And fixing them isn’t cheap.
The brakes failed in Sicily. The water system spluttered to a close in the Peloponnese and didn’t really work properly again until last year. And the Italian Alps almost proved too much for her 2.5 litre engine. But 28 countries and countless miles later, we arrived home in early October 2017, ready to plan our biggest adventure – a six-month road trip across the USA.
Several years before, one dreary Sunday afternoon, we had mused what we would do if we ever won the lottery. We decided on a musical tour of America in a RV, charting the history of modern music from the Appalachian mountains to Los Angeles, the Bronx to Memphis, and all points in between.
It was nothing more than a fantasy, and it might have remained just that if it were not for a growing realisation by both of us that our life was limited by time (and health), and that perhaps there were more important things than careers, ISAs and property.
Sunshine on Corinth
Call us foolhardy. Many did. But in the spring of 2016, we decided to cash in pension pots, sell our home and buy a second-hand motorhome to first visit every country in the EU (and Serbia) and then fulfil our American dream, which proved to be remarkably easy (if expensive) to achieve. Who knew you could simply drop off a motorhome at the Liverpool docks, then a few weeks later pick her back up from Baltimore port and head south to the Blue Ridge Parkway?
We have so many memories of those two extended trips. Christmas lunch outside in the sunshine of Ancient Corinth, just metres from the Roman forum where, 2,000 years earlier, St Paul had stood trial. Sipping port in – where else – Porto. The Hill of Crosses, a monument to resistance, in Northern Lithuania.
Drinking moonshine in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The Badlands of North and South Dakota and driving through the Mojave desert in search of Joshua trees. Mark Twain was right when he said that travel is “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." Everywhere we went, from rural Finland to downtown Detroit, we met warm-hearted, generous people who were delighted to show two strangers a glimpse of their culture.
But reflecting on the years since, when our foreign travel plans were blindsided by the pandemic, the best trip of all turned out to be a three-week drive down the East coast, from Fisherrow to Eastbourne, which we took in August 2020 when Rishi Sunak was exhorting us to “eat out to help out”. We did our best, stuffing our faces with salty fish and chips at every seaside stopover.
As we headed back up the coast, another lockdown looming, we realised that there was no place like home. We would never stop travelling, but there was so much to explore here in the UK, from the valleys of Wales to the industrial heartlands of West Yorkshire. And London. A traveller could spend a year exploring the capital and still only scratch the surface of one of the world’s greatest cities.
Malawi, Rwanda and Greece
Recently, we’ve made the occasional foray into Europe, but most of our trips were much closer to home. A campsite overlooking Berwick-upon-Tweed became our favourite weekend break.
Now the van has left home or, to be precise, secure storage outside Tranent. We will miss her. No airport departure lounge can match that sweet moment when the diesel engine sparked into life and the road ahead was full of possibilities. But it was time to let go.
But not to stop exploring. I celebrated my birthday last month in Athens. Today, I am in London. Next month I will be in Malawi, and will hopefully visit Rwanda in early 2027. Flights to Greece a few months later are already booked. And with my free bus pass, I am planning to see more of what is on my doorstep. It is years since I have been to Peebles.
As Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road: “Sal, we gotta go, and never stop going ’till we get there.” And it doesn’t matter where “there” is, it’s the journey that matters.
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