Dwti Draig

I am writing this whilst sat at a table on the Harwich-Hook of Holland ferry, looking out at the North sea, en route to our next adventure. Before I dive into our next adventure I should start by rewinding slightly to look back at the time spent at home after our last trip to Scandinavia and the Baltics in the Autumn of 2024, and this trip. 

We got back home late last year after what we considered to be a successful maiden voyage in our almost finished truck. We had a list of improvements and things we needed to get sorted, but first launched straight into Christmas. As soon as the Christmas chaos was over it was time to travel without Dwti for 6 weeks. Lyn had finally given in to agreeing to the Thailand trip we had had to cancel over Easter 2020, because, well, Covid. This trip could now be different as we were no longer working and could go at a different time, and, more importantly, go for longer! Yay! I won’t go into all the details here, but we managed to plan it all in December, and leave a few weeks later. Our trip started in Beijing, and then we visited Singapore and Langkawi (Malaysia), before island hopping the Andaman islands from Koh Lipe, Koh Ngai, Koh Lanta and Koh Phi Phi before stopping briefly at the mainland at Ao Nang before crossing the mainland to Koh Tao and Koh Samui before heading north to Chiang Rei and Chiang Mai and then finishing our Thai travel in Bangkok before returning home via the Great Wall in Beijing. The trip was exhausting, including international flights, domestic flights, long tail boats, ferries, speed boats, taxis, buses and overnight trains. We saw beaches, coral, elephants, sunsets, markets, monks, monkeys and cocktails. Lots of cocktails. I loved it, but more importantly, so did Lyn, who is now a SE Asia convert. We will definitely return. 

It was hard returning to a cold, dark house in February, knowing we had an empty fridge and SO much work to do on the truck at the worst time of the year. Lyn knuckled down and got it all done; often spending 12-14 hour days outside in awful weather. 

One huge job we knew we needed to get done was getting the bike lift and roof rack sorted, so the truck spent some time in March in Mansfield getting that done. Then, it was all down to Lyn. He needed to finish off the flooring in the seating and bathroom, adding cupboards and lots of different hanging rails. We now have new fans, external air vents and a huge air vent in our garage area to keep all our Victron electrical system cool. Dwti now had some new daytime driving lights to help people see us approaching and also the rear cameras have been remounted due to the the bike lift. There were hundreds of little jobs to do and lots of 3D design and printing for our overnight circulating fans that Lyn built from scratch with computer fans. We also wanted to pretty up the interior as it had deliberately been left really plain inside whilst we did our first trip so we could live with it to see what we needed where. It now has a new folding wooden yacht table to make it easier to get out of bed, the all essential coffee tins on hand, and some mandalas on the walls. Outside, after a lot of agonising and wasted money we eventually decided on a decal which I had seen on Instagram as a tattoo! 

Lyn also had to face the bittersweet task of selling his beloved Harley Davidson motorbike as it was just too big and heavy to fit on the back. Being the excellent wife that I am I spent my birthday visiting motorbike showrooms and we came away with a used BMW F800 GS Adventurer. It’s smaller and lighter and will be great for off road dirt tracks and sand. It just needs to be resprayed as I hate the blue!

All we had to do then was completely restock it all with clothes, food, equipment etc (which obviously was done last minute in pouring rain after weeks of beautiful sunshine), then we were ready for Trip 2!