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My mother Francesca is 73. A little over seven years ago she gave up houses. She lives in a converted delivery van; an F-reg VW LT35. It contains a toilet, a shower, a fridge and a cooker, a small dining table and a fold-out bed. Not much else. 

In the summer, she goes north, visiting grandchildren and keeping up with old acquaintances. In the autumn, she migrates southwards to Portugal. 

When she started travelling, we, her children, put it down as eccentricity. An act of parental dottiness, perhaps, that she'd grow out of. But she shows no sign of doing so. What's more, as we fly out to visit her, two things become clear. 

First, she is enjoying herself. We dash in from our frantic work and family lives to find her over-wintering in the Algarve, chugging at a leisurely pace from place to place as the whim takes her. There she enjoys an excellent Daõ for under two quid a bottle. She knows a shop where a good gin will set you back £2.50 a litre. A great olive oil is just as cheap. 

Secondly, she is not alone. If her lifestyle is an eccentric one, it is one she shares with tens of thousands of other northern European pensioners. 

Right now, parked up in motorhomes and caravans along Europe's southern shores, in Morocco, Sicily and Turkey, a massive army of Old Age Travellers sits sipping G&Ts. It is a growing phenomenon: pensioners, fed up with the quality of life offered in our cold, dark winters, are deserting us. The resorts intended for the summer's lager louts are being taken over by another, more refined generation: the SAGA louts, the Old Age Travellers, the OATs. 

No one is quite sure how many OATs there are. The Caravan Club - which provides information and insurance to many of the British OATs - says: 'All we really know is that the number of people who live this lifestyle seems to be growing each year.' That's be cause, while some use official camp sites, many others call themselves 'free campers' - or, more romantically still, 'wild campers'. Much like the New Age Travellers before them, they make their homes on roadsides, waste ground, beauty spots and car parks. 

Like most, my mother started on camp sites where, if you book in for a few months, a pensioner can pay as little £20 or £30 a week on site fees in the winter. Five years ago, while visiting a mechanic in Silves to patch a chronic rust spot, she noticed a gaggle of vans parked by the river nearby, and asked if she could join them. There is, you quickly learn, a kind of camaraderie among the OATs, a collective sense that they're doing something naughtier than they should be doing at their age. 

Wild campers exchange news of which sites are the best: which have been closed, which have been discovered. 'The bush telegraph soon gets to work,' one newly converted 65-year-old says. 'They'll tell you where the water is. Where the best place is to empty your toilet.' 

Leaving my mother parked up at her site, I drive around some of her old haunts. Cabañas is a spot that has been popular for years. At the eastern end of a nondescript tourist development is small car park. Behind it, in the old dunes, are a few acres of scrub. Among the 20-odd huge white vehicles, there are the old familiar faces who pass through each year. Lance, a tattooed and combative septuagenarian, wanders about the site in shorts and sandals, boasting of the 150 watts he generates with his three solar panels. 'I can get four hours of satellite TV out of that,' he boasts. 

A few yards further inland, Richard boils a kettle for tea. 'Long-life milk, unfortunately,' he apologises. With Richard, everything is numbers and specifications. 'I have 42 lockers in my van,' he announces, proudly. He is 71. Since leaving the RAF, he's done a bit of everything. 'I've had 49 occupations,' he says. For a while, he was a hotelier. Latterly, he ran a letter-press printing service. He finally quit that after an American customer demanded that he mix Univers Expanded typeface with Optima. Richard wrinkles his nose: 'I don't like doing something if it's not right.' Like my mother, Richard is a full-timer. At his home in Devon, you might have mistaken Richard for a slightly finicky obsessive. But here, among the massive white-flowering broom bushes, he is transformed into something far more adventurous. 

Richard tells the story of how he started. He had loved camper vans since he borrowed one in '87. The woman who persuaded him to go full-time was his 91-year-old mother. One Christmas, Richard took her out of her nursing home and cooked her dinner in his van: she couldn't bear restaurants at her age. The seats were always wrong. That summer, Richard took his mother out of the home and the two started to work themselves slowly around Britain, visiting relations and equally ancient acquaintances. It was, says Richard with a broad smile on his face, 'bloody hard work. She was damn fussy. Impossibly exacting. It was a challenge.' 

The tour complete, the summer ended. He thinks she just gave up after that: she had done all she'd wanted to do. 'I took her to hospital. She was dead exactly a week later.' Richard's voice cracks and his eyes water. He takes a deep breath. 'It still hits,' he says quietly. That summer changed Richard. 'And I haven't slept in a house since.' 

The year before last, he finally burned his boats, selling up his house in Devon, cashing in his old Kontiki van and shelling out £44,000 for an all-mod-cons Hymer motorhome. It's meticulously kept. Like Lance, Richard swears by his solar panels. But he uses his to power a household vacuum cleaner. 'That's my luxury,' he says, opening one of his 42 lockers to show it off. Proudly, he shows me his spotless bathroom. 'Only use liquid soap,' he cautions. 'Bar soap leaves scum.' 

Every OAT has a wealth of such tips. My mother, for example, advises that one should use white-wine vinegar to stop toilets from smelling: at 35p a litre, it's far cheaper than the proprietary brands. 

The OATs live a deliciously stripped-down existence: anything that doesn't fit in a van is jettisoned. My mother says the most successful present I ever gave her was a set of adhesive hooks. Technology is making life easier for the OATs. (Francesca is getting her first solar panel fixed as I write, though she has no plans yet for satellite TV.) These days, every traveller carries a mobile phone. Some use internet cafés to keep in touch. 

Francesca sees no possible reason to stop travelling until physical infirmity forces her to. 'This van will last longer, much longer, than I will,' she says. 

A couple of years ago, my mother pulled on to the site at Cabañas, and had barely time to set up house before the Guarda Naçional Republicana arrived, with mounted police, to turf her and her fellow OATs off the site. That winter, the GNR closed down Cabañas. But they had reckoned without the shopkeepers and restaurateurs. For them, their winter trade vanished with the camper vans. Besides, many have befriended the itinerant pensioners over the years. 

The shopkeepers threatened a boycott. The authorities backed down. Cabañas is open again. For now, at least. 

About 10 miles to the west, 68-year-old Norm announces: 'In three or four years, it'll be finished.' People are going to look back and realise that this was the golden period, he says. Norm reckons 95 per cent of the motorhomes here are owned by pensioners. 

Norm is another full-timer. A bluff, rotund Londoner, he's been camping since 1946. 'But I've been in motorcaravans for 26 years,' he says proudly. He and his wife Paul (Pauline) gave up a house in Enfield for van number nine, and shelled out £55,000 for their Hymer. 'With garage,' Norm jokes, showing off the huge locker at the rear where they sometimes store their Honda C70. 

Hardcore OATs know each others' vans, flashing headlights as they pass each other. You'd recognise Norm and Paul if you saw them: their numberplate is POO 100. 

Right now, Norm and Paul are travelling with three other couples: a Belgian, a Dutch woman, two New Zealanders and two fellow Brits. The men have spent the morning hooking up one of their motorhomes to Norm's generator using a bewildering conjunction of cables and chargers that stretches across the gravel. For men who tinker, OAT-ing offers endless opportunities. 

Now the cooperative has moved on to tackling the next shared task. Lunch. The Belgian, Alfons, arranges the tables in the hot winter sunshine. Frank, a white-haired man, appears with a tablecloth and a couple of bottles of Cte du Rhone. Alfons peels a prickly pear, carefully. Sometimes he picks the wild asparagus that grows here in midwinter. The marshes here are full of fresh samphire, too. 

'Look at what you've got. You go to different places. You meet different people. Right now we've got four nationalities here. It's a friendship,' says Norm, expansively. 

It's impossible to disagree. OATs make the same point, over and over. At home, they would spent their winters sitting inside, seeing few people, slowly vegetating. 

Until her late forties, my mother had always travelled. She grew up in Italy, Egypt and the Balkans, the daughter of a Times foreign correspondent. Marrying a man with equally itchy feet, she raised her children in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Brazil, Nigeria and Ghana. When my father left her, she landed with a bump in Leeds. For 20 years she stuck it out, but it almost drove her nuts. Now she's travelling again: you can see how happy she is. 

Tonight, she's parked at Quatra Aguas, just outside the port of Tavira. She's cooking dinner by candlelight. Curlew song drifts over the salt pans around her. Storks nest on the chimney stacks of abandoned canning factories. Avocets, redshanks and spoonbills still pick their way through the mud around the old quay in the dying light. In a few weeks, the flamingos will start appearing. 

Most people travel as couples: single women travellers are fairly rare. 'Some people say, "Oooh you are brave!"' says Francesca, sipping a glass of wine. 'To which I reply: "I'd have to be a damn sight braver sitting it out in my street in Leeds."