Reset search
European road tripEuropean road trip
SatelliteEdit route

European road trip

February - May 2024
Finally... we are off again on European Road Trip!
This has always been our dream, so lets go for it! Read more
Currently traveling
  • 57footprints
  • 8countries
  • 95days
  • 472photos
  • 5videos
  • 7.0kkilometers
  • 6.8kkilometers
Follow Calendar Share Bucket list
Date ascending
  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    Day 14

    14. Grave

    February 18 in the Netherlands ⋅ 🌧 9 °C

    We have made the decision to move south and find better weather, we are going to Hook back up to our WW1 & 2 tour.

    We left our sketchy park up and headed for our next park up at Grave, it was on the map as a strategic point in WW2. The bridge was named after a American soldier who stormed the bridge with just 16 men. The other soldiers jumped to early and landed nearly a mile back. The whole attack was a suprise ambush and was a success.

    The park up had a WW2 bunker next to it aswell which was pretty cool. We took Maddy for an explore in the rain and then had a cosy night in the van.    Read more

  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    Day 15

    15. Eiffol National Park

    February 19 in Belgium ⋅ ☁️ 9 °C

    Today we headed off after breakfast and started to head south to Valkenburg. We drove in and out of 3 countries heading down. We drove to a van services station and then headed to Valkenburg, unfortunately it was tipping with rain but we did drive through the centre and saw most of the sites anyway as it was very small. In WW2 Valkenburg was where Jews came to hide from the Nazi's. It is said that 3000 local people helped hide Jews in and around the local area, and only 1000 survived when they were caught.

    We headed onto Eiffol National park home to more battles during WW2, enroute we stopped at the American WW2 cementry. Lovely building but it was daunting seeing so many graves. On every headstone was a message about each soldier and out of the 7800 buried here, only 400 are unknown.

    We got to Eupen on the edge of the national park and found a great park up for tonight. We drove over a Dam to get here. We took Maddy on a nice walk through the woodland for a couple of hours (it was raining again though....)

    Looking forward to having a nice chilli for tea.    Read more

  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    Day 16

    16. Bastogne 'Battle of the Bulge'

    February 20 in Belgium ⋅ ☁️ 8 °C

    We woke up and took Maddy on a walk. Today we had a scenic drive across Belgium, it took us about 1.1/2 hours to get to Bastogne. We are visiting Bastogne as it is home to the 'Battle of the Bulge', one of the biggest battle sites in WW2. Firstly we headed to the another American memorial, which was unfortunately closed, but very magnificent and in the shape of a star.

    The musuem we planned on visiting was just next door to the memorial. We had a look around the musuem and it was very interesting, we saw a couple of tanks, one had been blown all the way through to the other side during the battle, and different vehicles such as the SS beetle. The Museum showed all the figures about the battle and the Allies were completely outnumbered in every way and they still managed to stand and then break through, which eventually lead them bit by bit all the way to liberate Berlin.

    There is a famous story about a Officer called Anthony McAuliffe, who replied to a letter from the Nazi's asking them to Surrender and he replied to the Nazi's "NUTS".

    Tomorrow as part of the Museum they offer multiple tickets so we are heading the the Foxholes tomorrow and to the actual underground base in which that letter was sent. This is another shorter musuem.

    After the musuem we headed to attempt to have a shower at a local pool, who didn't let us in even though had earlier said it would be fine.

    We found a nice park up next to a wood locally and took Maddy on a nice walk around. (sticking to the paths) after learning Mines are still found monthly here.    Read more

  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    Day 17

    17. Bastogne to Luxembourg

    February 21 in Luxembourg ⋅ ☁️ 9 °C

    Today firstly we headed to Bois Jacques Foxholes, where the American soldiers managed to stand against the Nazis. It was really real life as there was an App to download which made it virtual reality to what the woods would have looked like and the soldiers fighting in the holes which were infront of us. Felt quite humbling to be in a place where some of the finest American soldiers fought over an extremely cold winter.

    Afterwards we headed to the Nuts musuem which was great to look around. We are glad we did the museums over 2 days so you can appreciate it better. This musuem had a story which you followed which really brought back what Bastogne went through, the whole town was bombed and barely standing.

    We then chose a campsite for tonight as we both need to have a shower and headed through Belgium to Luxembourg. It is really nice here and suprisingly cheap, when you consider how wealthy Luxenbourg is, the tiny country has over 260 Billionaires and the average house price is 1.3 million Euros. Nurses are paid nearly £90,000 here. We haven't gone far into the country as not many places to stay, but the drive here was beautiful. Starting to feel a little like the Alps wierdly.

    After giving the inside of the van a deep clean, walking Maddy and having a shower. We had some Turkey snitzels for tea and then watching a film on our recently spotted 'hairline cracked Laptop'... Arghhh!    Read more

  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    4
    Day 18

    18. Luxembourg - Baden Baden

    February 22 in Germany ⋅ 🌧 11 °C

    We woke up to quite possibly our rainiest day yet and that means it's really rainy with the weather we have had so far.. 😂☔

    We decided to head to Luxembourg city to take a look but unfortunately all the parking was a nightmare... After 3 drives around the city attempting to park and then going down a road definitely not designed for a van, we decided to move on as we weren't desperate enough to go to a park and ride into the city. It was still very pretty even in the rain.

    We then decided to slowly meander down to Baden-Baden, which is the start of Germany's Black Forest.
    This route (half motorways) took us through France and Germany on the way down. We arrived just as the sun set in the distance and made camp at a local park up. The next few days we are slowly driving down towards Switzerland, 40 miles of the route is supposedly one of the best roads in Europe to drive so we are looking forward to the adventures to come.

    We took Maddy on a walk through the woods with many signs about the aggressive Wildschwein, (wild boar) They would be with us as we have a got a German frankfurter sausage risotto for tea. We have no instructions on how you cook the sausages and no signal so we are going to attempt to boil them... If no penguins uploaded tomorrow we have both died peacefully of food poisoning or attacked brutally by a wildschwein 😂😂    Read more

  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    Day 19

    19. Black Forest's high road

    February 23 in Germany ⋅ ☁️ 7 °C

    After a quiet and undisturbed night for our first stop over in Germany , we woke up to sunshine ! First sun we have had so far on our trip .
    We decided to embrace the sun and drive further along the Black forest . The roads were great fun to drive and very scenic .
    Along the way , we spotted a ski slope , so we decided to pull over and have a little look . There was a toboggan run there , but it was sadly closed today , which was gutting.
    We drove through the forest for another 10 miles and spotted another ski slope centre, with a natural history museum on site . There was also a ski jump centre , which looked seriously good fun, but a little daunting
    We decided to take Maddy on a good walk to the top of the slopes and through the woods , we wanted to get to a lake but after seeing it high up and the murky colour we decided to walk the other way.
    James took over the driving as we were already half way on this lovely road and it wasn't fair for me to drive all the fun parts.
    After reaching the end of the black forest Road, we ended up at a campervan service point to top up water etc. We then discovered that this was also a swimming pool car park and decided to go for a swim !
    The swimming pool was very impressive , there was 3 pools it had two really fun slides and a diving pool , with a climbing wall at the end of it . We spent pretty much all of our time on the slides and a while in the 32 degree outdoor pool . The slides were so cool as there was a screen displaying how quick you were going and ranked you compared to all the others that had been on that day. James got 27 kph down one of them!
    The showers there were amazing too , we felt super fresh afterwards.
    The car park wasn't exactly pretty and by the time we left , there were loads of other campers parking up for the night , so we decided to drive 20 mins back towards the forest and park up at a more scenic and private place . We ended up in a village called Rotweill , which , as you can guess by the name , is where the Rotweiller dog breed was bred .
    Once the van was all levelled up , time to cook some supper , but to our disappointment , the gas had run out . On the positive side , at least we now know not to trust our gas meter !
    After a gin, we couldn't drive as Germany has a 0% limit, so James was a beaut and cycled to the nearest village in freezing temperature to pick up some pizza. Finally, time to eat!    Read more

  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    Day 20

    20. Triberg

    February 24 in Germany ⋅ ☁️ 5 °C

    Today we woke up to the most glorious crisp morning. We took Maddy on a walk around the woods before getting the van road ready and heading off. First stop was to get some food from Lidl, then we refilled the gas... (this was supposed to cost us about £13 and only cost us £7, so got me worried that we may be having issues somewhere in our gas system).

    We did a rubbish stop and then carried on to our next stop Tilburg, famous for Germany's biggest waterfall and cuckoo clocks. The drive down was super scenic and we drove through some really long tunnels under the mountain. Once we arrived we were greeted with old alpine style German houses and Cuckoo clocks everywhere. Eventually, after driving the town a few times, we found a suitable park up. We headed with Maddy straight to the waterfall, it was absolutely raging due to the rain fall and snow melting recently. We walked up to the top of the waterfall and saw it from all angles, we really enjoyed this.

    With our waterfall ticket , we had access to 3 more attractions around Triberg one was a photo studio with many amusing backgrounds for funny pictures- we had great fun messing about in here for a while. The next attraction was a Museum which was cool to see all the old clocks, Grace loved the museum as they had a huge section on crystals as many are mined here.

    We then decided to miss the last attraction which was a model village and head to some of the Cuckoo clock shops, they had literally thousands, one shop is famous for having 1000 on display. These ranged from £150 to about £20,000.

    Afterwards we headed quickly down to the "worlds biggest cuckoo clock" to chime at 5pm. It cost £1 million to build and has 30,000 uniquely made parts. The engineering behind them is great and massively ahead of the their time when they were originally produced.

    We then headed to our park up, approx 25 mins from Triberg. This took us over a mountain passing through the dark forests which seemed lit up from all the snow surrounding them. It started to snow which made it even more enchanting.

    We checked out the gas tank and had intermittent gas again... we think the regulator has failed but luckily this is a standard cheap item across Europe and should be fairly easy to replace ourselves or pay an engineer to fit.

    Had a nice curry and enjoyed sorting through the numerous photo's we took today.    Read more

  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    1
    Day 20

    20. Triberg extra photos

    February 24 in Germany ⋅ ☁️ 5 °C
  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    Day 21

    21. Zweribach-Wasserfalle

    February 25 in Germany ⋅ ☁️ 8 °C

    Wow, another amazing morning. We had a bit of a lie in but couldn't bare to waste the lovely weather so we headed off down some pretty awesome roads to another waterfall. The snow and the black trees made a real contrast and was a spectacular route all the way. As it was so clear we could see some of the Alps which was pretty cool. We packed some lunch and headed down, Maddy was loving having a run about. It was about 4.1/2 mile walk to the falls. There was a bridge which passed over the gushing water, and then we climbed down some steep stairs with a metal rope to get to the bottom.

    At the bottom we stopped for an hour and had some lunch before the steep walk back up the hill. All the German people we have met so far, seem so lovely and welcoming. We spoke to a few people on our way down briefly.

    After the walk we headed to our next park up, nearly a km above sea level and on the edge of woodland, quite possibly our most remote park up yet.

    James spent a couple of hours trying to get the WiFi working and Grace cooked a lovely roast with marinated chicken and loads of root vegetables. It was so delicious. We then spent the rest of the evening looking at our next movements, we really need to spend the afternoon in a laundrette as we have SO much washing to do!

    Another great day in sunny Germany, it's amazing what some sun can do!    Read more

  • JGM TRAVELS 2023European road trip
    Day 22

    22. Camping Hochschwarzwald

    February 26 in Germany ⋅ ☁️ 9 °C

    Sad to be leaving our park up today , we really felt like we were in the wilderness last night , there were no other vehicles or campers in sight.
    Our washing really needed doing and we both wanted a warm shower , so we decided to stay at a campsite with everything we needed, we just couldn't be bothered with trying to find a laundrette and somewhere close to park the van .
    Luckily, there was (what seemed) a cheap £35 a night campsite about a 40 min drive away in a place called Hochschwarzwald. We drove straight there , admiring the snowy landscape along the way .
    As soon as we arrived , we realised that the area for campervans was literally a gravel car park , but at least there was a cool view of the ski slope opposite. Also, we had to pay extra for each kW-h of electricity we used.The washing machines and tumble driers were also expensive.
    We went back and forth to the washing machines and gave the van a good sort out. Maddy had a good walk too. By the time everything was sorted it was about 2000. We had a hearty spag bowl for tea and went to bed after.    Read more

  • 2024© FindPenguins
  • Home
  • About us
  • Blog
  • Group Tracking
  • Press
  • Terms
  • Privacy Policy & Cookies
  • Support
  • Legal notice
  • English