2. Documents
Membership of the EU has made us all very blasé about documentation. Just grab your passport and off you go anywhere in Europe without any worry about other documentation. But taking a vehicle is an undertaking which requires care and responsibility. So, in plenty of time, I made a list (Mrs DM will tell you that I obsess about lists) of the documentation I would need. The basic list
was:
- Passports
- Driving Licences
- Vehicle log book (V5C)
- Vehicle Insurance certificate
- VW Assist membership
- Travel Insurance details
- EHICs (European Heath Insurance Card)
- Travel Insurance policy docs
- Ferry confirmation
- Pre-booking confirmations (only our Auschwitz booking on this occasion)
- National Trust and English Heritage membership cards (various European orgs have reciprocal arrangements).
A month before - yes I've got all those.............
Two weeks before - oops, no idea where the EHICs are. Never mind. They are really optional as our travel insurance covers us anyway.
1 week before - Documentation pack prepared. Apparently Aferry only issue electronic tickets but I have the email confirmation so that's OK. So all good to go
.
Apparently not..........
Imagine the scene. Two days to go. Time to get some currency. Yes lots of different currencies - it seems its not just us that are not in the Euro (topic for a future post).
Very helpful counter assistant in the post office - "Do you have some ID?" (required for anti-money laundering regulations).
DM - "Yes, here is my driving licence".
CA - "you won't be hiring a car when you are away will you?".
DM (proudly) - "No - we're taking our own camper".
Pause.....................
CA - "eh, do you realise that your driving licence expires in less than two week's time?"
what? WHAT ?? WHAAAT ???
Of course she was absolutely right. We do all know that photo driving licences only last two years don't we............. . That's not good. But I guess it just meant that Mrs DM would need to drive all the way home. She wouldn't be keen as she doesn't really like driving on the continent (actually its probably more that she doesn't actually like driving anywhere with me in the passenger seat - unless I'm asleep. But as long as we allowed plenty of time to get home then that would be just about manageable. Quick text - can you just check when your driving licence expires. Yes, of course. Two days after mine.
Well that was a problem. It is an offence to fail to immediatley produce documents in most of the countries we were visiting. So if neither of us could produce a licence I imagined us stood on the side of the road as a polizei, policja, policia, rendorseg, policija etc advised us that we could not drive on and had our beloved cali towed away
.
Cue frantic phone calls to our insurance company and the DVLA. In short:
- you can legally drive in the UK as long as you have applied for a replacement licence and have 'no reason to believe that it will not be issued'.
- you are insured (at least by comfort) as long as a licence exists (irrespective of where it is. e.g. in the post)
- a paper licence doesn't expire until your 70th birthday but once you have had a photo one then they are on a 10 year renewal cycle.
- DVLA send out reminders 3 months before - eh NO they don't. I am OCD about dealing with official mail (that doesn't surprise you does it
) and neither of us received reminders!!
- DVLA advise that it takes around 3 weeks to issue a new licence. There is no urgency procedure and they only send documents standard second class post.
It wasn't looking good for us catching a ferry in just over 48 hours!! The only good news was that if you have a government gateway account and have recently had a new passport then you can renew on-line (it uses a recent passport photo) and if everything is in order then the new licence is dispatched within 24 hours. Fortunately we were both able to do that so we were just dependent upon Royal Mail.
There was no way our original departure date was going to happen so we rebooked the ferry for two days later and decided to go to Suffolk for two days as a warm up trip. Fortunately our youngest daughter was house and dog sitting so could check the mail. If they didn't arrive then it would just have to be more Suffolk and less Central Europe. As it was they arrived the day after our original departure so we got away 2 days late (hence our slightly truncated itinerary).
The moral is simple - don't just check that the documents exist - check that they are also VALID !!!
In the end of course we didn't actually need to produce the driving licences. But we did need to produce the vehicle papers at the Hungary / Croatia border so they were equally important. More about border crossings soon.
PS. promise to try to make most posts more concise than this
.
). Last year I blogged on the basis of themes and topics rather than a day by day itinerary so I'll do the same this year. I've got a fair few ideas as to topics which I'll start-off with but feel free to suggest any aspect that you'd like to hear about.
