About Man Van No Plan
About Man Van No Plan.
Angus aka The Driver is your author for all of the blogs and driver for all of the trips on our Motorhome adventures. With a name like that it is not difficult to work out that I’m Scottish born and bred and now live in Mid Argyll on Scotland’s beautiful west coast. I’m a Falkirk ‘Bairn’ and lived near Falkirk for the first forty two years of my life until my employer at the time, Ladybird Children’s Books, convinced me to relocate my family to the East Midlands to work from their head office in Loughborough.
Our family spent the next sixteen years there and although I moved on from Ladybird Books to work for other book companies based in London, Bridlington, Sheffield and Nottingham before I formed my own bargain book business, we stayed in, and enjoyed life in the East Midlands.
With our two daughters graduating in Cardiff / Belfast and Sheffield respectively and beginning their careers in Belfast and Sheffield / Leeds, we no longer needed to rattle around in a family sized house, and with both our mothers having signs of Dementia, we decided to move back to Scotland in 2011 to be nearer to them.
We chose the tranquillity of Argyll over our home area and began semi-retirement in 2011 leading to full time retirement for me in 2015. For the four years between 2011 and 2015 I worked as a Visitor Centre Manager for the National Trust for Scotland at their Crarae Gardens location between March and the end of September. I enjoyed the role but I re-evaluated my time there when my manager passed away quite suddenly from leukaemia and this was a blow as he was such a lovely man. When someone you know dies, who was three months my junior, it makes you re-evaluate your life and why you are working instead of travelling and enjoying whatever time we have left.
To cut a long story short this led to a pre-Brexit six months tour of France, Spain and Portugal followed by a three month tour of Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Belgium. We then had two three month winter tours to the Alicante area, the last being in September, October and December 2021. We had a great time as the weather, food, wine and friends we met there were all wonderful but our motorhome is built to tour, not sit on a Spanish campsite for two or three months at a time so we resolved to see more of Europe, especially regions and countries we have yet to visit, hence our March 2022 trip to Denmark via France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Northern Germany. The 2023 tour took us through the Netherlands to Germany, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and we have just finished our 2024 to the Netherlands and Germany’s Bavaria and amazing Romantic Road.
Mary aka The Navigator is my long-suffering wife who has been together since the third year of High School and she has supported me in all the big decisions that couples make, including the uprooting of our young family to live in England. It was tough for her initially as we were in a not very good rented house and she was on her own during the day as I was away working and the girls were at school. The 1995 / 1996 winter was particularly cold which didn’t help, but things began to fall into place when our previous house sold and we could buy and settle into our new home.
We had always travelled extensively right from the start of our marriage in a 12ft Sprite Alpine caravan and when our daughters came along they enjoyed the camping lifestyle until they outgrew the bunk beds and we sold the caravan.
From the late nineties through to 2007 we jetted off from East Midlands Airport to wherever Ryanair could take us for as little as possible, the best being flying to Palermo in Sicily for free, only paying the taxes. Munich, Rome, Copenhagen (via Malmo), Dusseldorf, Paris, Amsterdam, Ibiza and Majorca were just some of our destinations in this period.
2007 was the year when our lives changed when Mary was diagnosed with cancer in her kidney and had it removed with keyhole surgery. Thankfully the operation and subsequent treatment was a success and she made a full recovery. Mary had no idea she had cancer and had no symptoms and it was only the skill of someone investigating a scan she had taken for something else that it was discovered.
This raised the big ‘what if’ question and we resolved to make a few changes to our lifestyle starting with the purchase of a new Motorhome in 2007. We had always wanted to buy a camper van when we retired but that was at least ten years away so with such a serious health scare we took the plunge and bought a McLouis and started touring, and we haven’t stopped since.
The newish role of grandmother suits her, and as I mentioned earlier, spending Christmas and part of the summer holidays with our granddaughters is a high priority in her life. I mentioned earlier that I fully retired in 2015 but Mary never did and went on to work on the ‘bank’ of relief workers for the local sheltered housing organisation, a role she enjoys and it works well between our travels.
Mary loves cooking and we live well on the road in Otto the Auto-Trail F68, who is our new (2023) companion on our travels.
We would love to hear from you so please use the form below to contact Man Van No Plan to fill in your name, e mail address and your message and we will respond as soon as possible.
Thanks
Angus & The Navigator x
Man Van No Plan
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