As 2025 kicks off, the realisation dawns that we have just three months until we aim to start our KNL On Tour adventure. For those new to our plans, the idea is to take a sabbatical of six months, starting on April 1, and then to tour through some of Southern Europe with a trailer-tent (“vouwwagen” in Dutch).
The trip will be in two parts because in between we still need to come back to the Netherlands for the transfer of our new house. Leg 1 is Portugal, going down as far as Lisbon. And then back up to do the transfer of our new house, spend some time painting and doing what needs to be done to get ready to move in.
Then we’ll start on Leg 2 which currently is Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and then over onto mainland Italy. If we still have time, we’d like to see if we can still touch on Croatia before heading back to the Netherlands to be home for actual move into our new house probably in mid-September. October 1 it’s back to work. At least that is the plan at least for now – it’s been a little fluid over the last couple of months. But before we get there, we still need to get ourselves organized.
Since the idea of doing this originated (around summertime), we have been debating which mode of transport/accommodation to pick, each of which we spent quite a bit of time researching. We started with a camper which besides being too expensive is, in our humble opinion, also fairly limiting if you are planning to stay somewhere a little longer. Our two-week adventure with a rental camper in Italy in 2012 proved that navigating some of the bigger cities and smaller side roads with a camper could be a bit of challenge. From there we moved onto looking at caravans – more mobility because you leave your caravan behind and can easily do day trips with the car and most of the other comforts that a camper has.
For a while this was our top pick if we could keep it to a fairly small caravan, not too old and not too expensive and it had a mover and the right type of bed (long story that one). Then quite by chance we stumbled on the trailer tent idea when visiting a really, really big camping shop (De Wit in Schijndel). Mmm.. that was maybe also an option. It’s smaller and easier to maneuver than a caravan, you still have clear lines of sight behind you, and you are not just transporting air. We also think it will be fuel efficient and we later found out that it is also cheaper on the toll roads because it is the same tariff as a car. Not that we are planning to do travel a lot on the toll roads, but you just never know. And to be honest, it invoked the adventurers in us – camping but then with a good bed to sleep on and at least some of the creature comforts of a camper/caravan.
For those of you maybe not familiar with the concept of a trailer-tent (“vouwwagen”), it literally is a trailer with a tent built onto and/or into it. There are various ways of setting it up (some easier than others) and various configurations (symmetrical, a-symmetrical) depending on how many sleeping spaces you need. You can also extend it with all kinds of things like additional side tents (more places to sleep), front tents, awnings/canopies etc.
We also used Christmas to at least make a start on some of the other essentials – pots & pans, crockery, cutlery, that kind of thing. And on every “research” trip to the camping store, we manage to buy something. Our last biggish purchase was the Cadac Safari Chef gas BBQ. Just the small one because it’s just the two of us. It’s going to be so funny when we have our first couple of stops because it is very clear to see that we are camping newbies!!
But back to the trailer-tent. After quite a bit of research on what we thought would work/would not work, we settled on two brands – Trigano and Combi Camp. There were three reasons for this. Firstly, they both had kitchens attached to the back of the trailer that you could use like that – no need to disconnect it and carry it somewhere else. The second reason is that these two brands seemed to be the only ones that offered a “built in” fridge element in the kitchen block. That meant we could free up some more space in the car (although we are probably still going to do a second freezer type thing). And lastly, because both have a hard top (instead of a soft cover), you also have a section of your tent, opposite the sleeping area with a hard floor (and off the ground).
After much deliberation, mainly by Kris 😊, we decided to go for the Trigano because it was a better fit for our budget. So off to the Vouwwagenspecialist in Boxtel to find out what the lead time was and to have a look at how high the storage space was so that we could start looking at getting some crates. Once there, we were a little disappointed to see that the Trigano we wanted, the Itinea, had limited storage space under the bed. We wouldn’t be able to put crates higher than 20 cm in there and if you are going away for five months, that just doesn’t seem feasible (although in all honesty, we have no idea how much we need/want to take).
So that now only leaves the Combi Camp option which is quite a bit more than we wanted to spend. There was one available second hand but unfortunately, we waited too long, and it is now sold. So, when the time comes, we’ll just have to bite the bullet and make it work! For now, we are still just looking and dreaming about what five months in a trailer-tent like this one is going to look like 😊:
