From Brighton to Istanbul, our Epic Road Trip Across Europe

Our first big adventure together was a road trip from our UK home of Brighton to Istanbul in Turkey (and back) from August to October 2011.

Istanbul wasn’t originally our destination.

We set out from the UK to spend three months driving around Europe, primarily visiting places outside the main cities such as Paris or Rome.

East was our (rough) destination, where we knew life would be cheaper and warmer than the North.

We ended up visiting 18 countries in the end, the start being France and the furthest point as Turkey. About two-thirds of our time was spent in South-Eastern Europe, from Croatia to Romania.

Background of our cross Europe Road Trip

For a good few years, I had wanted to travel overland across Europe by road mainly to see the countryside and towns, places typically harder to reach if purely using trains and buses.

I didn’t really want to go in a big motorhome/RV either, for one thing, there’s no way I could have ever afford one, or driven it.

I also liked the idea of wild or stealth camping – parking outside of campgrounds in rural areas for free – which I believed was harder to do with a quite obvious-looking motorhome.

Converting a vehicle

It remained an unlikely dream until I met a certain someone in New Zealand in 2009, who didn’t dismiss my slightly mad idea.

In both Australia and NZ there is a surprisingly large number of cars that are converted into makeshift campervans (by professional companies as well as travellers themselves). Jean Robert owned one himself in New Zealand a few years ago.

There are a few companies in the UK and France who hire out cars of this type, but for long-term rental, the cost is actually ridiculous (£4,000+).

What’s more, none of the companies were willing to insure us for some of the places we want to go. So we decided to buy our own people carrier and convert it ourselves.

Our mini DIY campervan

Come early May, we bought a lovely blue 1996 8-seater automatic Toyota Lucida (only 90,000 miles!!) and hideously expensive insurance.

The latter was actually harder to find than the car as it seemed everything was against us – age (me, young), foreigner (him), questionable destinations (I’m looking at you, Balkan countries), time in Europe (over the usual month limit), large and powerful car.

We also had an issue with the actual van conversion. The main problem was that we lived on the seafront in Brighton, a busy city with absolutely nowhere for us to park a vehicle.

So we stored the car at my grandmother’s house, who lived 15 miles away; a good problem solver, but this inevitably meant that JR didn’t end up having much time to work on it, so really what we ended up living in for three months was a work-in-progress!

Our route:

France
Monaco
Italy
Slovenia
Croatia
Montenegro
Albania
Greece
Turkey
Bulgaria
Romania
Hungary
Slovakia
Czech Republic
Poland
Germany
Luxembourg
Belgium
UK