I have been looking for a reason to revitalise my love for telling you both a story, I moved to Portugal, I got swallowed in work and life and as a result all of this fell away and I let my blog slow to a stop. I still wrote when I did big trips, but at the end I could never bring myself to pull the images and video together into stories that I felt anyone would want to read.

I tried…I posted a video of “captains log” but I didn’t really send it properly from my 2022 drive from London to Lisbon, but it wasn’t enough to excite me into finishing the two big stories of 2022. Oman and Tanzania were major adventures that I have finally finished (or at least have now made live), but that never made the big e mail sending ceremony because I got bogged down in believing it needed a full video and image production to make it worthwhile. But then I realised it doesn’t matter, and realised I missed just writing stories. Who cares who reads them!

So now its July 2023 and I am facing the biggest and longest expedition I have ever done. It definitely won’t be the most extreme off roading, or wild adventure, but what I know it will be is long and I can only hope full of fun. 

A full circumnavigation of the Iberian Peninsula. 3,500km around the whole of Portugal and Spain, in August without air conditioning. I plan to go from Lisbon, to Faro, to Seville, to Malaga, to Valencia, to Barcelona, to Girona and on into the Pyrenees to explore the mountains and to take on the Smugglers way between Andorra and Spain. From the mountains to Bilbao, to the Babia Luna national park and into Northern Portugal to the Douro valley and then to travel south down the Portuguese coast and back home to Lisbon.

I have been lucky to be able to prepare Ventura for this inevitable blasting, but I can’t lie – She is extremely likely to be the weak point! The journey is likely to be over 3,800kms which is punishing for any vehicle, to make a point before the trip starts some useful distance to compare to:

London to Inverness = 900km

Lisbon to Gdańsk = 3,400km

Sydney to Perth = 3,900km

I’ll keep Instagram up to date, and hopefully will collate those stories into a blog post to keep the 4 Low 4 Adventure website alive!