Let me Entertain you..!

If you’ve been following us on our Facebook page, you’ll know that we haven’t exactly been having the best of weather on this trip so far. In The Netherlands we had rain pretty much every day for 4 weeks, bar perhaps a couple of days. The last 2 weeks in France haven’t been much better, with only about 2 or 3 days with some sunshine.  And the next 10 days in northern Spain are looking very wet again…

Luckily, we have good waterproof coats and shoes so it doesn’t stop us going out and about and seeing things, but even so we’ve been out and about a lot less than we would normally be…

When the weather is as bad as it has been, what is it like living in a motorhome? Isn’t it crammed? What about cabin fever? 

Well, it isn’t too bad really. Ritzie Rapido is super comfortable and cosy so that’s lucky for us. But unless you keep yourself entertained, you could end up just staring out of the window at the rain for hours and that would soon drive anyone crazy!

The trick is to keep entertained. So what do we do to keep ourselves entertained whilst travelling through this deluge?

And how do we carry out all? Because when you don’t have lots of space and have think about weight, and sometimes even about power (especially when it rains a lot and your solar output is low) it can become a bit of a challenge to carry much with you… So here’s our low tech, space saving solutions for things to entertain us.

We have a myriad of things on-board to keep us from getting bored, getting cabin-fever or going crazy. Most fit in small spaces, are travel-sized or at least lightweight and hardly any are technical or require power other than some light in the dark.

We’ve got quite a lot of games that we’ve been learning/remembering how to play, like backgammon, ludo, Yahtzee, monopoly, dominoes and card games. We also have checkers and chess, but we haven’t tried those yet. Games are definitely ranking high in entertainment value as they’re proving lots of fun at the moment! No two games are ever the same and the dice fall differently every time. Several games come in a single small box, others are travel editions, and a pack of cards or a set of dice never takes up a lot of space!

We both quite like a bit of crafting as well, although Stuart’s crafting is more DIY based whereas I quite like a bit of crochet. And then there’s dot-to-dot (not because I’m stressed, just because I enjoy it!) and even colouring books. These are nice things to do to pass the time while the rain pounds on the roof of the motorhome. 

Then there is always something to be done like writing or editing photographs and/or videos, creating images for the aires we stay at and working on our travel map, blog and website. We love creating content like this and helps us learn new skills and improve on our existing skills. 

Finally, we carry quite a lot of books which we read and then swap at campsites (most campsites have book-swaps, great to refresh your library on the road) and also DVD’s to watch as we don’t have satellite TV so we can’t spend all day simply watching telly, except for local TV which might be great for trying to learn the language but it’s pretty hard work. 

So that’s it really. We keep entertained indoors in a small space when it’s raining cats and dogs outside. Next job is to look at our planned route, for which the weather is looking particularly foul… and try to come up with something else that will be slightly warmer/drier/sunnier. That’s what the atlas is for, our most-thumbed book! Wish us luck!