So I phoned Elephant to find out whether our car insurance would cover us for this trip. It would appear that, while most of the countries we want to visit are actually covered by the insurance (with the rather odd exception of Andorra, and the more understandable one of Russia), Elephant will only cover me for thirty days out of the UK. "Paul" assured me that they were really quite flexible about that, until I told him that I was after something more like two hundred days, and he bowed out gracefully and said I was somewhat out of luck. I realise it`s going to be tricky for Elephant to actually prove that we have been out of the country for a particular length of time, but given that rather a lot of our belongings will be travelling with us I think it`s not really worth the risk. Time to find someone else, and I`m not entirely sure where to look.