What is the Europe 2011 Road Trip?
Back in the summer of 2011, three friends (Mikey, Joe and Martin pictured below) took a road trip around seven countries in Europe. The car was a banger bought at auction. The budget for the rest of the trip was ‘optimistic’, which meant a lot of camping and free camping. This website details the adventure.
Who / What / Why?
Martin here. I’ve been wanting to put this site together for some time. The trip was pretty epic and big enough to warrant a micro-website to store the memories. We took plenty of photos but the real win for content is the journal entries by Mikey. Without those I’m not sure how accurately I’d have been able to list all the places we went to!
I’m not 100% sure on how the trip came about. I know it was after my first year at Bath University, the three of us decided to arrange a summer adventure. We’d talked about doing some sort of road trip with the intention of parking up and cycling around. The chat and ideas progressed from there and in no time we’d settled on driving around some of Europe rather than just sticking to the UK. We even briefly planned to do the trip in Joe’s car (a mk2 Nissan Micra!) but this got vetoed, probably for the best. £450 and a car auction later, we had our Renault for the trip!
In total we were away for around a month, visiting 7 countries and generally enjoying what Europe had to offer.
I’ve actually been meaning to collate the various photos, videos and diary entries from that trip since the moment we got back. I’m not sure why it’s taken me around 10 years (yes!) but here we are. Aside from being full of nostalgia I’m hoping it’ll influence some future adventures as well.
What happened to the car?
We sold it! Once we got back to Cornwall I listed the car in the local paper. I think I had it listed for around £500. The first person to come and look pointed out that it smelt a little damp… I thought perhaps it needed a good clean post trip but when we opened a floor compartment it was full of water. The second person to look pointed out the exhaust was held up with rope (not sure how we didn’t already know this!).
Beyond the sale all I know of its history is that its MOT expired 25 February 2013, so it only lived on the road for another year. RIP.