Tales from our travels - part 1

I need to tell tales from our travels before I forget. I know we made the road trip movie but that doesn't go so far as to even scratch the surface of the real experience - sorry! The trip could have been a feature film, although probably more art-house movie than box-office blockbuster. So I'm going to attempt to tell a few select tales here over the next couple of weeks. I will attempt to be truthful and not to embellish the story, but then there was that favourite quote from 'A Knight's Tale': I'm a writer, I give the truth scope!

Starting at the beginning has long been recognised as the very best place to start and I shall take as my beginning the moment I laid eyes on Boris's van. It was then that leaving was a truly imminent reality. All I knew up to that point was Boris has a long wheel base, hi-top van. No make or model. What appeared on my parents drive was an all-too-familiar white Transit - I've driven a similar one around Europe - with some very unfamiliar modifications.

It may surprise some people to read there are times I don't enjoy drawing attention to myself. In my mind this trip was to be one of those times. But there is no way to be inconspicuous in a van with a skull covering the Ford emblem on its grill, sporting haunted house and skeleton graphics on its sides and flying the Jolly Roger from between its back doors! We would be doing adventure. We began to load.