Onward crunchy soldiers: One major maneuver

Progress is coming on slower than a German summer, but this week we advanced like a Prussian infantry unit, one major maneuver closer to victory on the continent. We finally found the vehicle that will serve as the mothership on our great voyage. It should come as little surprise that we went about $10,000 over budget on this critical acquisition, but it does promise to be one epic piece of German automotive engineering.

Back home this camper is known as the Eurovan, but here in Europe, VW calls it the California. Call it what you like, this thing is built for the open road, with tons of cargo and passenger space. For camping, it comes equipped with sink, stove and mini fridge, and enough room to sleep all four of us. The diesel motor only has 105,000 km on it, which is about 65K miles, which means it’s barely just broken in. And I can’t wait to drive this tank through the narrow cobblestone streets of the European towns and villages we’ll be visiting.

Thanks to the miracle of German bureaucracy however, it will take another week before we actually have the van in our possession. Licensing and inspections are no trivial matter here. We can’t say we’re thrilled about that, but the mandatory inspections required every two years on every vehicle licensed in Germany mean that the Autobahn is never clogged with clunkers. As with everything, there are trade-offs. If you want to be able to drive down the freeway with no speed limit, then you have to keep those piece-of-shit cars—so common in America—off of the streets. Cracked windshields, bald tires, side-view mirrors hanging on by a scrap of duct tape, these are things you’ll never see on a German roadway.

So now it’s off to races! We’ll be saying goodbye to the in-laws and all their unlimited hospitality, and driving off into the hinterlands, towards new places and unfamiliar faces. And much to our delight, our social calendar has begun to fill in quite nicely. I feel like we’ve explained our loose but carefully thought-out plan about a hundred times already, but for those of you who may have missed out on the oft-stated briefing, here it is in writing.

The plan was to sell everything we owned and come to see the wife’s family here in Germany—as we have now done—and then acquire some reliable and commodious means of transportation to get us around Europe for the better part of a year. Using websites like wwoof.org (willing workers on organic farms) and workaway.com, we have been seeking out work-exchange opportunities where we can help people out in anyway possible, be it gardening, renovating, babysitting, cooking and cleaning, at their homes, on their farms, or in their businesses, in exchange for room and board.

We originally had an extremely vague itinerary penciled out, starting in Germany in the late spring, then heading west toward France, and then south towards Spain and Portugal as we moved into the fall and winter seasons. Along the way, we mean to explore as much of Europe’s soft bucolic underbelly as possible. We’d like to stay for about a month at each location, especially seeking other families with similar attitudes and amiable children. It has taken us a little longer than expected to locate hosts who were interested or had space to accommodate an entire family, but we’ve gradually been making arrangements at some very promising locales.

We are now set to spend the month of June on a small family farm near Görlitz, Germany, which lies right on the border with Poland. I’ve consulted a map, and it turns out this is in the opposite direction of France; but not to worry, we’re pretty open-minded. And we have time. In July we are scheduled to help a family in Franconia (part of Bavaria, i.e. southern Germany) at a baroque castle that they’ve been renovating. You can believe we are all looking forward to spending the summer restoring this old castle in the Alpine foothills.

Then in August we are headed down to Austria to help out on another family farm, with a large family and small farm. Serendipitously, they happen to be hosting an international conference for homeschoolers, a subject we’re particularly interested in learning more about, especially here in Europe where the rules and regs appear to be far more stringent. Not bringing us much closer to Portugal, but we are definitely excited about this destination and the gathering of presumably like-minded parents and children.

After that, our plans are still open. We’re currently looking into some very interesting possibilities in France, and we’re quite confident that once we get on the road, and into the work-exchange network, things will continue to fall into place for us, as they have been doing for the last several months.

For more informative and entertaining stories about our WorkAway experience, be sure to check out our articles on WWOOFing with Children and New Education: A year without a principal.