INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL : Darting Through Europe in a VW Camper

The longtime dream come true was 14 months and 27,000 miles poking about Europe wherever fancy took us in our VW camper.

Our itinerary, only vaguely formed at the start, led us from Holland’s dikes to a Berber hamlet in Saharan Morocco; from rose-perfumed campsites on Turkey’s coast to windy, rainbow-crowned John O’Groats, Scotland’s northernmost mainland town.

Our camper, a conversion with a raised fiberglass roof and a lot of homey touches, is small, agile, self-contained, economical and perfect for driving up, down and through Europe’s narrow, twisting old towns and byways.

During our more than a year on the road, all choices were open to us. We were free as birds. Well, almost. We had self-imposed limits of time, taste and money. While we mostly ignored the vagaries of weather, a particularly nasty European winter sent us fleeing to Morocco. But wandering about that exotic land for two months turned out to be among the highlights of our travels.

International tensions also gave us pause. In April of last year we stood on the pier at Gytheon on the tip of the Greek Peloponnesus considering the schedules, wanting to take a ferry to Crete. But prudence won. The week before, after a bomb blew up, a TWA plane had come into Athens airport almost directly over our heads in the campground near Glyfada, a resort town near the airport.

American Warships

Now the Mediterranean was bristling with American warships. By the time we got to Olympia, site of the first Olympic games, our country had bombed Libya.

During most of our travels, Americans were scarce, but friendly people helped us everywhere. They took us into their homes, were eager to talk with us, often in sign language.

My husband Mark and I started with several ideas about how we wanted our trip to go. We wanted to travel off the beaten track on secondary and tertiary roads; to travel off-season to the big tourist attractions, and at the height of the season to be up at dawn to avoid the crush; to use public transportation in all big cities; to stay in campgrounds, using hotels only when necessary.

We planned to “free-camp” where it appeared totally safe or we had no other choice, and to prove we could make this trip on the meager budget of our Social Security retirement checks. On all counts we did what we set out to do.

On a Limited Budget

We could live excitingly on $1,000 a month (exclusive of camper shipment, insurance and major car repairs) even with the steep price of European gasoline, $2 to $3 a gallon, and the falling value of the dollar, if we had our own “house” with us.

We decided to ship our camper over after rejecting the risky option of buying a used camper in England, as some fellow campers we later met had done with varying degrees of satisfaction and expense.

The principal drawbacks involved our 110-volt electrical wiring versus European 220-volt, and incompatible propane and water fittings. We did not need to use electrical hookups; the latter was solved to greater and lesser degrees of exasperation with a variety of adapters.

But if money had been no problem, we would still have chosen the vagabond life. We wanted to sleep in our own bed (European hotel beds are about as predictable as amateur souffles). We enjoy shopping in markets and souks. We enjoy cooking outdoors. Above all, we love freedom of movement.

In all this we were aided by the fabulous network of campgrounds in Europe where whole segments of the populations seem to shift back and forth in tents, caravans (trailers), campers and small motor homes during the season.

Virtually all cities and many of the smallest villages have municipal or commercial campgrounds that vary in quality and facilities.

We avoided big, modern, recreational complexes. More to our taste were the “Aire Naturelle” camps of France, the “Certified Locations” of the British Caravan Club, the forestry camps of Turkey and their counterparts in other countries. Their facilities are primitive, sometimes only drinking water and toilet or a disposal point for your chemical toilet.

Countryside Locales

But often the number of campers is severely limited . . . only five camping units per Certified Location in England, for instance, and they are usually in beautiful countryside locales.

One that particularly delighted us was along the rail of an off-season race track in Warwich, England, where we used the jockeys’ dressing room and weigh-in facilities. Another, in Normandy, was in a vast field beside the sea, full of sand, sea grasses and sea birds, owned by the Assn. Nautique de Bessin, which had a launch site for small sailboats where a group of young children were learning the sailing arts.

The price of camping is very low. We averaged $3.87 a night for 398 camping days. The cheapest: 78 cents in Monte Gordo, Portugal, beside the sea near the Spanish border; the most expensive, $14 in Interlaken, Switzerland.

Good facilities include hot showers, clothes washers and dryers, an adequate store, elbow room, attractive layouts and attention to cleanliness.

We really preferred the security of a campground, but sometimes would stumble onto a place too beautiful and serene to leave. Such was the case on the beach 20 kilometers north of Agadir, Morocco, where we free-camped for three weeks in the company of three other camping rigs--Canadian and British.

The scenery and weather were heavenly in January, the bird watching and hiking in the nearby hills fantastic. The fishermen pulled our evening meal from the sea as we watched and brought us wonderful, nutty, flat rounds of freshly baked dark bread every day.

Take No Chances

This kind of camping in developing countries requires some precautions. Anything left outside at night tends to disappear, so our nightly buttoning-up included fastening our table, chairs and other paraphernalia to the camper with a padlock and heavy chain.

Another wonderful free-camping experience was in the mountains of Greece near the Albanian border. In a small park beside a river of crystal-clear water gushing from a mountain cavern, a truck driver who spoke some English assured us that it was safe to stay. A few fishermen worked the stream; the local people stopped by for picnic lunches and to fill their water jugs. All smiled on us, and we tarried there under huge, old, peaceful trees for several days.

We also had notable free-campings in municipal campgrounds that had closed their facilities for the season but did not ban the use of the sites. At Chatillon-sur-Seine north of Dijon, France, for instance, we spent four glorious days exploring the town and countryside with nary a fee collector in sight and with only one other camper, which housed a French family of three. Down the hill a bit was the town heated indoor swimming pool and recreational complex which, for a small charge, we could use along with its hot showers and toilets.

Mammoth state-of-the-art supermarkets are not uncommon in Western Europe, but don’t expect more than one or maybe two per city. For the most part, small markets, little specialty shops and municipal markets are everywhere, stocked according to the season.

In real hard-scrabble countries such as Yugoslavia, Turkey and Morocco, or any small town in poorer areas, you take what you can get. If you think you can’t get along without some pet staple, better stock up in advance. Such as peanut butter, one of our “necessities.”

We ran out of peanut butter in the Ouarzazate in the hinterlands of Morocco and were rescued by an unlikely source, an encampment of Outreach Christian missionaries, young people with several kids who had cases of Dutch peanut butter with them. They acknowledged that selling salvation to the Muslims of Morocco was pretty hard doing.

Much Cooking Outdoors

We did a lot of cooking outdoors, even in the rain. Mark devised a 6x8-foot canopy/awning to shield our sliding door from rain and sun and to extend our living area. You must carry your own folding table and chairs in Europe.

The camper’s two-burner stove was used as an auxiliary source, mainly because we didn’t like steaming, greasing and smelling up the inside of our living room on a daily basis. In common use in Europe are Camping Gaz International cylinders to which one or two burners may be attached. On ours we cooked a variety of nourishing meals, often trying to duplicate the local dishes we had sampled in restaurants, the tajines of Morocco, stuffed vine leaves of Greece, the koftes of Turkey.

If rain depresses you, forget about camping in Europe. With the right attitude, you learn to enjoy it. Put on your rain gear, carry your umbrella and skirt the cities.

Most rain is benign, but we unknowingly drove into Turkey from Greece on the day Chernobyl blew up. We spent a couple of days in Istanbul, then headed west and south down the coast toward the wonders of ancient Pergamum and Ephesus.

Clouds Over Black Sea

When we stopped for a few nights at a small camp on the shore of the Dardanelles, a little north of the ruins of Troy, the wind suddenly shifted, blowing cold from the north, and we got a downpour. That night on our short-wave radio, BBC told us about Chernobyl. The winds, they said, had taken the radioactive clouds over Poland and Scandinavia.

It was not until much later that we learned that the wind had shifted briefly, bringing the cloud over the Black Sea area and over Thrace directly north of our campground on the night of our storm. Turkish tea was later found to be contaminated. We don’t want to know about us.

We will never forget the chaffinch that perched on the rim of our pot of spaghetti sauce in the magnificent camp at Glencoe in the heathered Scottish highlands. Nor the dazzling white hillsides of petrified water, dripping stalactites and glistening mineral basins of Pamukkale, Turkey; nor the great earth-red bison and deer painted by prehistoric man on the roof of the caves of Altamira in northern Spain.

Nor the Moroccans wading about in the muck to build a rock-and-mud road across the site of a washed-out bridge who pushed and lifted a line of cars, including our camper, on their way; nor the flock of 40 to 50 curly-horned goats filling a mountain road in Corsica, attended only by an anxious dog that directed his charges to the left so we could pass.

Retirement, plus our camper, have expanded our horizons and given us immense wealth in unforgettable memories.