Tips for a Road Trip in a car to Europe with dogs

If like us you have never done a road trip to Europe with or without dogs, you might be interested in our planning for this trip.  You might like to review a few tips below, these worked for us.

• We swapped my work car for an SUV to hold dogs, humans and our worldly goods for the journey. (We didn’t choose a campervan for various reasons).

• Get a roof box, we filled it with lots of stuff which we absolutely had to have with us, (our view of this changed later on but we used most items, we just had a lot of bags)!

• We packed in this order: Six months’ worth of winter clothes, boots, coats, and summer clothes in the roof box – weighed also to check capacity, we didn’t want the box exploding open speeding down the highway!

• In the boot: A separate 14 days’ worth of summer clothes for each of us, for all single/two day stops over the 2-week journey to the south of Spain, in two separate small suitcases and 2 overnight rucksacks. We also packed laptops, cables and chargers.

• Setup car for euro travel for each country (as they differ)! Directional fixing for headlights, car kits (high viz jackets, triangle, torch, small car parts kit, alcohol test kits -for France).

• Car insurance for travel abroad, decent playlists for sounds, GPS for navigation and Go Pro camera for bandits on highways (it’s a ‘thing’ in certain parts we heard).

We mentioned what we packed for the dogs in the previous blog post.

• For the Humans: Medical kits, health insurance, E111 health card (absolute necessity ‘gold card’ ), snacks, water, some files with paperwork for route planning – Ferry booking paperwork, mix of printed Michelin and Google maps of certain parts of the route, Pet friendly Air BnB and Booking.com accommodation bookings with some printed routes for remote locations. We didn’t want to rely solely on phones for access to emails or route mapping in case of poor service or Wi-Fi en route, which was often the case.
• Food boxes insulated, one electric for cool or hot

Yes this was the boot and yes, there was a roof box on top!

I know I am considered an’ over the top’ planner, but we did make it work for us. We used most items except for a small dog carrier and 2 yoga mats (why? … you may well ask, too many van-life videos before we left home)!