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Sometimes I get bullied and cajoled by my family and friends into doing social and exciting stuff, just as I need to do some work, or just as i’ve finished work and want to bury my face in a book/ice cream/beer (or preferably all three) – poor me, what a hard life etc. etc…

Taking an extended road trip like this depends on me working for part of the time, both in terms of keeping my existing clients happy and earning enough money to pay the bills. I’ve been experimenting with different ways of doing this.

The first few weeks revolved around my experiments with charging via solar or from the car, so I would do sprints of work when I had a full battery – which usually meant a couple of hours a day.

On longer stays on a wifi equipped campsite, when i’ve paid for a day pass on the wifi, it often works out better to take whole days in the campsite bar, plugged into the mains. I use the term “whole day” loosely – it has been rare to start before ten, and there have been frequent breaks for a dip in the pool, keep my kid entertained, socialising, trips to the supermarket etc. – the usual things you might expect to do on holiday if you weren’t trying to make a living at the same time.

Other days we might be traveling, or taking a day trip, there’s not much opportunity to get any work done, albeit answering emails on my iphone.

It hasn’t always been ideal – sometimes the days, or part days where i’m trying to enjoy the holiday i’m left in “work mode”, really feeling like I should be getting on with something, other days i’m working away when I really should be going for a swim or reading a book. I’m not sure what the solution is yet, maybe it’s just getting better at switching between work and play, or maybe it’s longer work days with a stricter emphasis on work, or several days in a row on and several off.

Maybe the real solution taking a shorter road trip next time and not trying to do any work at all, but i’m enjoying this too much – how many people get the opportunity to spend this long having an adventure with their family? So i’m making the most of it – i’ll make it work somehow!

(The pop-up tent in the photo above is a Quechua Base Seconds)

It’s seven o’clock in the evening and i’m being led on a wild goose chase round Santander in the north of Spain, by the very out-of-date “points of interest – cash dispenser” option on my satnav. I’m led to a building site, a car park and, worryingly, a cliff, before finally spotting a bank that wasn’t on the list. I park the car illegally in a spot reserved for motorbikes and run a lost tourist flip-flop sprint to the ATM to secure some cash for the evening. Camping Cabo Mayor – the campsite that we didn’t really want to stay – where i’ve left my wife and kid setting up camp, informed me they only accept payment in cash, and we haven’t got food for the night either.

We’ve driven well over a hundred miles to get here from Biarritz. The whole european trip has been pretty much unplanned, but so far we’ve always phoned ahead to check availability, but after being greeted by spanish answerphone messages and total failure of online booking, we decided that with a list of campsites hastily scribbled in felt tip on a notepad the last time we had wifi, that we would chance just turning up. In the second week of August – “peak season” apparently. The first site we tried, 20 miles or so east at Noja was manic and full, the next one at Suesa we didn’t even stop to enquire, as we could see from the road it was full to bursting and it wasn’t what we looking for. We ended up at Cabo Mayor on the hills above Santander, somewhere i’ve stayed before, on the first night of my “Spanish Adventure”* 13 or so years ago.

We’ve obviously been spoilt by the campsites we’ve stayed at in France – on this site we are crammed in like battery hens, with barely room for our car and only able to put up part of our over-elaborate tent arrangement. After carefully locking all things of value out of site in the car, we take a walk up to the Cabo Mayor lighthouse and have a beer looking out over the sea. Annoyingly, it’s chilly – that’s not how I remember it. We then retire to the bar down the road from the campsite, where things are more relaxed and I get to practice some of my rusty Spanish – not very much really, but considerably better than my french.

Things were a bit different last time I was here. Back then as a young and single hippy in a beaten up van, I slept in carparks, down side streets, on beaches, in the woods and basically anywhere I thought I could stay for the night without getting moved on by the police. Back then I was also trying to earn a living as I went, but busking rather than coding – I think I am having slightly more success with the latter. Not far from where i’m standing is the spot where I first ever dared to sing in public – I played a lemonheads song to some random tourists and earned a few pesetas, leaving me on a high for days.

Back at the campsite we feel slightly marooned – there’s not even room to sit outside the tent to enjoy a drink. We don’t want to stay more than one night on this site. Without having somewhere in mind, it becomes obvious that carrying on further into spain the next day might be counter-productive for what we want to get out of this trip. We decide that we are going to make an early start the next day, back the way we came – a 280 mile trip back to our new favourite french site at La Romieu – we’ll have to save exploring Spain for the next trip, when we’ve done a bit more planning, maybe next time taking the ferry to Spain and starting the trip there. Meanwhile i’m happy knowing that back at La Romieu with wifi and a plug socket for the week I can get some work done and earn back the petrol money from our weekend detour.

*My Spanish Adventure is something that I always meant to write a novel about, but if it hasn’t been written yet, I doubt it ever will. Also, the things I thought would make interesting reading in my early 20’s, are probably less so now, but there must be at least a blog post in there!

I had been doing really well keeping stuff charged by solar power alone in the good weather, but three days of cloud and torrential rain resulted in me borrowing a mains adapter from the campsite reception and turning the boot of my car into a charging station.

The final straw was torrential rain yesterday afternoon leaving us huddled in the quechua base tent watching a film on the laptop. A nearly flat macbook was topped up with a half charged powergorilla (the result of 2 days solar charging) and we just made it all the way through Tom Hank’s “Big” with a few minutes battery time left.

It was only sheer luck that we happened to be on a pitch with mains hook up – most of the sites have more choice if you don’t need electric, but we ended up on a pitch with mains. I need to get hold of a proper electric hook up lead – I wasn’t sure if UK/Europe mains hook up leads were the same or not, and the leads I looked at in the UK were very bulky, so I decided against it.

I’ve just returned from the campsite bar after unsuccessfully trying to use the campsite wifi – it keeps going offline because of power surges apparently. I guess I should be getting a lead with a surge protector built in. Meanwhile we sit out the storm with a medley of films, and frequent dashes to the car boot charging station to swap chargers over.

On a brighter note, the Quechua tents are holding up a treat in the rain 🙂

The temperature gauge in my car says it is 28 degrees centigrade in the shade. I spent most of the day working on the balcony of a campsite bar, using my very little french “Une cafe noire sil vous plait” to procure coffee, because I really shouldn’t start on the beer yet, and the french don’t really do tea. Despite my appalling pronunciation, each time I receive an espresso in a glass or cup, and know (from the change rather than the spoken response) that these cost me 1 euro 20 each time. Occasionally one of the bar staff speaks to me and I nod and smile – hoping that what they are saying is good, rather than “can you please leave now?”.

From the balcony I can see the “beach on the mountains” – a sandy beach on a turquoise lake, with the French Pyrenees as a backdrop. In the water are a load of kids (one of them my own), having a riot with an inflatable roundabout in the shallow part of the lake. At lunchtime I wander down and have a picnic lunch in the shade with my wife and kid, then I wander back up to the bar. Although my solar charging experiments are showing some promise, I plug into the mains to enable me to work for a decent stint without the “plate spinning” needed to swap round partially charged batteries, while I get others charging.

If I wasn’t working, now might be time for a beer, but I stick with the espresso. It’s hardly “chilled” here, i’m being accosted by flies, I can barely see my screen, even in the shade. Some workmen take the table next to me and start talking far too loud, and seem to be enjoying themselves far too much at my expense, (or maybe that’s just my “not speaking the language” paranoia). To top things off, someone drops a whole tray of empty glasses and a splinter of glass pings off my arm. It doesn’t draw blood, but adds to the feeling that this isn’t exactly the ideal working environment. But then I look at the view again, and see my family enjoying themselves in the sun, and I know that i’m earning enough through working part of the day each day (or a whole day every other day) to justify the extended holiday, and that I am in fact living the dream.

We’ve been on the road in france for a few days now. I have an iPhone with t-mobile sim, and was offered (via SMS) one of a few data roaming bundles when I drove off the eurotunnel in calais. I opted for a 30 day/ 200mb bundle for £40, which should be plenty enough for checking email and the odd bit of remote working. At the first campsite we stayed at in the town Jumièges, the phone was showing a strong 3G signal through Orange France, but it was struggling to download webpages, via the phone or tethered to my macbook. Sometimes they loaded, sometimes they didn’t – mostly the latter. I wasn’t planning on doing any serious work on the first day anyway, but it wasn’t encouraging.

The campsite was shady and the clouds were grey (followed by thunderstorms and lightning), so it would have been pointless to try solar charging! The battery on my casio elixim camera had gone flat (probably accidently left switched on in the bag), and the only way I have of charging this is on the road is using the 240 volt inverter on the leisure battery. This is very inefficient, so took quite a chunk of charge out of the leisure battery. Packing up in torrential rain the next morning everything was a bit frantic, so I missed an opportunity to get some charge from the car while we drove the next 200 miles south.

The second campsite near the town of Ligueil in the Loire valley, had free wifi which stretched as far as our pitch a good 200 metres from the office, which was really useful. From there I did a couple of hours work, caught up on email and launched a few new features on one of the sites I look after. There was plenty of sun, so I plugged the SolarSupra panel into my leisure battery via the 12 volt connection to top it up. I haven’t got an accurate way of working out how effective this is, but I have to presume that it its a minimal trickle charge, so would require days of trickle charging to have any useful effect. When I am stationary for a longer period of time, i’ll try to to leave this hooked up for a few days to see how it fares.

Back on the road heading south to St Emilion, I plugged the leisure battery into the 12 volt socket conveniently located in the boot of the beetle, and by the time we reach the campsite it was fully charged – if only I could get that kind of charging power from nice clean solar power. Also along the way, stopped at a services near Tours my mobile data connection allowed me to check my email no problems, so i’m thinking it will just be a lottery, but at least I know where will be a good bet when we head back up this way.

Meanwhile i’m going to try to charge my iPhone exclusively from the SolarMio for a while to see how I get on with that. I can’t help but cheat a bit as every time I plug the phone in to the laptop to get photos off it, it charges a bit!

The site i’m currently on – Camping Domaine de la Barbanne in St Emilion, has wifi but I need to go and pay for a time period, and the signal doesn’t reach our pitch. This means I need to work offline, then probably before I leave, will pay the minimal amount to check my email (i’m getting no data connection here) and upload some work. I think this will be the case for much of this trip, so i’ll make note of any useful lessons as I go.

It is also worth noting that I had given up getting a data connection on my iPhone, until I switched off 3G and rebooted – I have been getting a slow but working data connection eversince – good news.