The Rendez-Vous

I awoke a couple of minutes before my alarm went off. It’s a weird thing that often happens, and damn useful when you travel as much as I do. I wanted to get going at 8am, but in the event, we had coffee and breakfast with Ali’s mum, played Ollie and the many dogs at […]

Fetch The Pooch!

It’s quite difficult to get your head around just how hard this despicable Brexit government make it for refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine (or any war, for that matter). Not only are we the only country in Europe that is demanding visas from Ukrainian refugees, children, babies (in case said baby is a Russian […]

Stockport

It was now Friday. All things being equal I should have been home with my feet up yesterday, but things have a way of not quite working out exactly as planned. Since Bear and I didn’t leave on Sunday, since we had to pick up Gordon and because of the “emergency” stop at Adam and […]

The Thirteenth Dog

7am and we were up and enjoying the incredible breakfast spread at Łagów Manor. By 8am we were back on the road. I filled the tank up before we crossed over to Germany, as fuel in Poland is substantially cheaper. We then had a solid five hours of driving through Germany before stopping for lunch […]

Radomsko

Bear, however, had other ideas. Rather than get some shut-eye, he took the remaining supplies to the Humanitarian Aid Centre in Przemyśl, where he met up with his contacts who had come to collect the boxes and take them into Ukraine to help with the current crisis. By the time I got up at 8am, […]

Keep on Truckin’

So it was a early start on the Tuesday morning, and one hell of a drive, all the way from the Texaco services in Belgium to near Medyka on the Polish / Ukrainian border. We set off just before 8am, which felt like 7am as we lost an hour when we crossed the Channel. Three […]

Of Mice and Men

By 10am on Monday morning Bear and I had no news about the 4×4 and whether it had passed its second MOT inspection. For those of you not from the UK or well-versed in the joys of British bureaucracy, an MOT is a certificate of road-worthiness that is a legal requirement for all vehicles more […]

All Wheel Drive

Almost as soon as the 2nd journey was over, we started prepping for the third. The plan — the original plan — was for Ciaran, Bear and I to use the UK4UKR funds to purchase a 4×4 and to deliver it to Gordon the medic in Medyka on the Ukrainian border. He would use it […]

Utrecht

It was another early start on the Tuesday morning as we packed up the van and left Osnabrück. We stopped for breakfast at a petrol station along the way into the Netherlands, I topped up the tank a little, just enough to get into Netherlands… since the cost of fuel in Germany at the moment […]

Victoria, Arthur, Timur, Dasha, Varvara & Olga

I woke up at 2am freezing cold, so I clambered over into the drivers seat and turned the engine on for about 15 minutes until the heater really kicked in and the van was warm again. I then knocked the engine off and went back to sleep in the back. At 4am I woke up […]