We love our logo!

We are beyond delighted & excited to get a logo for our blog!

Thanks so much to John, David & the team from Signiatec for generously gifting it to us this week to wish us well on our van life travels! David designed the logo from scratch inspired by reading our blog & came up with the most perfectly fitting logo we could have never imagined. It’s all four of us & our dog Buckie in our campervan driving away from the Hook where we lived & worked. The lighthouse in the background will always be part of our lives, it’s where we met & fell in love while working there ten years ago.

Now we’ve got to get it printed to go on t-shirts, hoodies & onto our camper van. Liam & I both worked with the team in Signiatec on various Hook jobs over the years & their signage & graphic design work is the best out there and we appreciate so much what they have done for us this week.

This gift was absolutely perfect timing after we recieved bad news last week from Stena Line Ferries. Back in April when we launched the blog, it recieved a lot of attention & we were asked to go into the Beat FM radio studio to talk about it with Orla Rapple for her Sunday show. Through that show, one of the PR team for Stena got in touch to say “we would love to discuss the possibilty of linking up in terms of complimentary ferry travel in return for content”

We were buzzing & told all our friends and family the good news but we didn’t post anything about it as we were waiting for more information and to see what sort of content they were looking for. I had emailed & phoned them in the weeks and months since but recieved no answer from them at all until just last week when I got an email saying “I’m afraid at this time Stena Line wouldn’t be in a position to link up on this activity. Apologies for the delay and please do keep us informed on any other opportunities which may come up in the future.”

It was very annoying to be honest as we were holding off buying a ferry ticket because of that first message we recieved over three months ago. I wish they let us know sooner as we could have booked the trip ages ago, so now we’re back shopping online for the cheapest way to get to France. We can take the ferry from Rosslare or Cork to France or else we can drive through England.

If anyone has experience with any of the ferry providers or recommendations on which route to take we would really appreciate a heads up. We hoped to hit the ferry on August 27th, the day after our going away party at Hook Lighthouse but the ferry trips seem to be cheaper during the first week of September so I think we’ll book a one way trip during that week. It will give us another week to sort out things at home first but we are so ridiculously excited to get going.

We plan on spending a couple of weeks taking our time driving West across the north of France including Normandy & Brittany then head South through the Pyrenees into northern Spain where we will drive West to the North West coast where we will see the UNESCO world heritage center Tower of Hercules lighthouse. We will drive South from there down the coast of Portugal which should bring back memories as that’s a drive we did before and it was beautiful. We will drive all the way down to St.Vincents point lighthouse on the South West coast of Portugal. By then we will need to decide where we want to be for Christmas, we hope to continue East to Spain to celebrate their low key Christmas, New Years & their festival of the three Kings. That’s pretty much as far as we have planned so far.

We both know travel and life in general often doesn’t go to plan and we are keeping an open mind, you never know who you might bump into along the way who may give you some great advice on where to go & what to see & experience.

The truth is, most of us only discover where we are heading when we arrive.

livinoffthehook@gmail.com