01 - Introducing Trevor

The seemingly self-indulgent concept of writing about my everyday activities to broadcast to the world in expectation of others reading it and finding it remotely interesting is not necessarily something that appeals to me. Blogging is something that should normally be reserved for those with far more interesting lives than that of a finance technologist and HR professional, right? Yet with such an adventure laid out before us, Melissa and I felt that creating a public diary of our travels and our next chapter is a good opportunity to update friends and relatives on our progress, allow us to remember the finer details of our trip, and determine once and for all that a career in journalism is not waiting for us in Sydney.

So here we are, co-authoring a blog that will document our road trip around Southern Europe. What is yet to be decided is which of us plays the part of Rob Brydon and who plays that of Steve Coogan in our budget parody of “The Trip”. Please do not feel obligated to keep up with the series, that kind of unconditional friendship and love is reserved for our mothers who are of course expected to read every last character. Saying that, this will be used to test who our loyal friends truly are with a quiz at the end of the trip with all those that don’t pass being ruthlessly scrubbed from the Christmas card list to save on postage from Australia.

Speaking of characters, Melissa and I would like to introduce you to the lead protagonist of the blog, Trevor the Hyundai Terracan. Trevor is the work horse that will carry us from Alicante in Spain to the heel of Italy and back. This is when the blog title “Trevor’s Trails” hopefully makes a little more sense, where Trevor does refer to the car that we’ll be driving and not an old homeless man we met down the pub that is tagging along for the ride.

Trevor is a 2005 Hyundai Terracan that has been kindly loaned to us by my Mum, Linda, and her husband, Paul. The car has already been a great servant, evidenced by the 147,000 miles on the clock, yet exhibits the same delightful shade of green and vigour for adventure as the day he rolled off the production line; that is apart from when he decides that his indicator doesn’t fancy working at random intervals and for no apparent reason. Trevor, or Trev to his close friends, is a right hand drive, automatic, air conditioned, 4 wheel drive, 2.9L beast with a greater taste for petrol than George Bush and Tony Blair combined.

Conveniently, Melissa has decided to keep her renewed driving licence in Sydney, meaning that the full 6,000 mile / 9,000 km round trip will be driven by me. This is of course intentional to tie in nicely with her penchant for instantly falling asleep when in the passenger seat of any car. It certainly has nothing to do with Melissa’s navigation skills that, even with the aid of google maps, will invariably mean we will get lost with her in the passenger seat. The up side is that I can listen to the podcast or music of my choice for the ride and won’t just be subjected to “The National” on repeat.

Our full itinerary can be seen in a link to follow soon on another page and is interrupted at various points by inconveniently arranged weddings and stag do’s (all of which were organised well before we decided to do this trip so it’s all our own fault really). We start with a couple of weeks at Casa Palmer Kirby in Lorca, Spain, before driving up through Andorra, the French Riviera, a full loop of the Italian coastline, into Slovenia, before coming back round through France and to where it all begins in Alicante. Our great ambition is to experience a taste of true Mediterranean life and not just the life portrayed in the tourist filled cities that we’ve toured in the past. What better way to end this European chapter of our time together than by traveling around the Italian countryside that we’ve both fallen in love with. 

We won’t be making any promises as to the frequency of the blog posts, however expect them to come whenever one of us needs a break from the other by putting headphones on and mindlessly writing the next instalment. In other words, every 3-4 days.

So here we have it, the beginning of the terrific tales from Trevor the Terracan’s trails. Enjoy!

J & M