Welcome to the Grahams on Tour

Our motorhome has quite a large garage and that's led to us being pretty lazy when it comes to packing it. In the past we've tended to just chuck stuff in there but given we'll now be carrying a motorbike, and also will be going away for longer, I thought it'd be better to get a bit more organised. As a start I've fitted some cheapo shelving from Ikea to replace the various bags and boxes that used to lie on the floor. I've also fitted a cargo net to hold some light stuff - t

We've got quite a few things underway with sorting out the motorhome. One fairly easy option was to switch all the lights to use LED's, as those use a lot more power than the halogen and flourescent lights that our motorhome has as standard. There were quite a few different types of lights and each needed a different approach: G4: The reading lights above the beds use little G4 bulbs and those can just be replaced directly with LED versions. For example where a 10W halogen G4

Got a very welcome early phone call from the garage that had the motorhome to let us know their mechanic had fixed the suspension bushings last night and they're completed its MOT this morning. Really excellent service (J & J McIndoe in Broxburn) and they will definitely by my first port of call for future MOT's. We brought the motorhome back to the house and checked it over. The water pouring out the bottom when I turned the pump on initially confused me until I realised the

I'd arranged for one of my motorbikes to go in for its MOT first thing, but the day got a bit more complicated when it turned out that it was also the first day I could get our motorhome booked into the MOT dealer for its MOT. Still with the bike due in at 09:00 and the motorhome at 13:30 there was plenty of time in between. For convenience reasons I'd arranged to pick up the little MSX125 (took a lot of persuading to get the Honda dealer to turn it around that quickly bit it

As we're planning to mostly stay away from campsites on our trip I decided it'd be worth getting better guidebooks for the Aires in France, Spain and Portugal. There are also schemes where you can stay overnight for free which look interesting, so we also got joined the UK Britstops scheme as well as the France Passion scheme. Britstops allows you stay overnight at pubs and restaurants in the UK if you have a meal or a drink or two. I'd heard good things about them from a few

Research into the best little motorbike to take in the garage of our motorhome all pointed to the little Honda MSX 125, otherwise known as the "Grom". It's small, light (101kg) and supposedly lots of fun to ride. Our local dealer had a pre-registered one in a very bright yellow with a few hundred quid off, so we decided to go for that. Looking forward to picking it up later in the week, and Fiona is looking forward to re-learning how to ride a motorbike!

Well the big news today was that I finally found the main set of keys for the motorhome, which had been missing for a while. Turned out they were hiding in the glove compartment of one of the cars. We took a trip out to visit the motorhome and it all looks fine and started ok as well. It looks like there will be space under the passenger seat for a 2nd leisure battery, and while the gas locker currently has 6kg bottles in I think it might be possible to take 11kg bottles inst

No real progress on preparing the motorhome yet although it is booked in for an MOT on Thursday, which I'm hoping it should pass. In the meantime I've been spending some time sorting out my neglected fleet of motorbikes - many of which haven't been started in a long, long time. There are 5 at the moment and the plan is to keep maybe 2 or 3 of them and get rid of the rest. At the moment I'm not sure if I'll MOT the ones I'm planning to sell or if I'll sell them as projects - s

When driving from London to Edinburgh we've long since figured out that the best option is to leave in the early hours of the morning, to avoid the London traffic. So after filling the car with the legacy of Fiona's old working life as a teacher, plus a pile of garden plants that she th0ught might not otherwise survive, we left our London place at 5am. Sadly this backfired because the M11 was closed due to a l0rry fire, with no diversions signposted. Thankfully the navigation

The reason we'd been hanging around London the last few days was because I had a speed awareness course I needed to attend - due to being a mildly naughty boy on the A1(M) a couple of months back. It's a 4 hour course and did initially have me thinking that maybe taking the points instead might have been a decent idea, however overall it wasn't too bad. The main point of interest was just how poorly a majority of the people of course knew the speed limits. In particular what