The Milavsky's are in Europe right now!!!
Why Not Take Your RV to Europe? by Adelle Milavsky
Europe is a great destination – and traveling there by RV is comfortable and inexpensive. We have made a couple of such trips and know that, even when you take into account the cost of shipping the vehicle, this kind of travel is the least expensive way to go.
One of the big differences between camping in the U.S. and camping in Europe is that European cities have campgrounds either in the city or close by, as well as in rural or vacation areas. If you have your own RV in Europe and you want to tour a city, you simply drive to a campground, park the vehicle and take public transportation to the old part of whatever city you are in. Centre Ville (Center City) is where the tourist sites are – from Roman ruins to medieval towns to museums and open-air markets where you can buy food (and nearly everything else).
When we first thought about making our next European jaunt with our RV, we anticipated a lot of problems. All the difficulties turned out to be easy to resolve and all are discussed in great detail in our just published book, Take Your RV to Europe.
Q -- How will the RV get to Europe? |
Can I handle the paperwork? You don’t need to do any. |
Q -- Does shipping cost so much that it wouldn’t pay to do it? |
Q -- Are there are size restriction? |
| Q -- Isn't gas very expensive? A -- It is, but the distances between tourist areas are so short that it doesn’t matter. Also, you won’t be driving every day. You’ll want to spend longer periods of time as a tourist in places like London, Paris and Amsterdam, for example. |
| Q -- Can I get insurance? A -- Yes. |
| Q --Do campgrounds have electricity. A -- Yes, but you need to buy a voltage converter to change the European 220 volt system to the 110 volt system that any American RV has. |
| Q -- Are there dumps that motorhomes can use to drain their waste water. A -- Yes, nearly every campground has an in-ground dump. |
| Q -- Are the roads as good as those in the U.S.? A -- In most countries they are. Certainly the main highways are comparable. |
There were lots more questions, but none of them proved to be insurmountable. We spent our first three- month journey in Holland, Belgium, France and Germany. Then we stored our RV and the following year we spent three months touring England, Scotland and Wales. And we’ll be going back.
When we returned, we wrote the book that we wished we had owned before we started thinking about making such a trip. This book Take Your RV to Europe: The Low-Cost Route to Long-Term Touring has just been published in Branford, CT by The Intrepid Traveler (copyright 2005). It is available right on this web site through Amazon.com.
The book has loads of information about preparing the RV for Europe, about preparing the home front for a long absence, how to ship an RV, about vehicle and health insurance, and also about what to expect once you get to Europe. We have information about roads, descriptions of requirements by country, and a large number of companies who can help you plan your trip.
Some of our readers will not be able to make such a long trip right now. They will enjoy reading the chapters that describe our adventures. The book does include descriptions of our trips and the appendices include the many letters we wrote home from Europe. The letters will let the reader travel along with us!
View from Campground in Conway, Wales
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