Update October 2020.
Well it seems like years ago that I updated the ‘about us’ page and when I looked back I could see that it was actually nearly three years since it was last updated. It’s hard to believe that we have been on this journey for four and a half years now.
So I thought it was about time that I updated the page for the third time. We would still call ourselves full-time travellers as our house is still rented out and we spend the large majority of our time touring Europe in our motorhome doing some volunteering occasionally. What has changed, though, is that for a couple of months in the summer for the last three years we have worked on a campsite in Cornwall as a break from travel and to spend a bit of time each year in a part of the UK that we know quite well. Having both grown up in Devon we both spent many holidays in Cornwall until we moved to Wiltshire.
Towards the end of last year we were feeling a bit burnt out with being on the road and in the van so we rented a house in Portugal for a few months in order to recharge before planning a tour of Sardinia and Corsica. Well, as everyone knows, the Covid 19 pandemic put paid to those plans but we adapted and were fortunate enough to be welcomed back to a volunteering role in France where we stayed throughout the period of lockdown.
I’ve also decided, for various reasons, to create a new blog for the next chapter of our travels so if you are interested then please click the follow link on the blog.
Currently we are back in the UK having finished our stint of work on the campsite with some new plans in store which you can read about on this new blog very soon.
Update January 2018.
Well I thought it was about time I updated our ‘About us’ page as we are now over twenty months into our mid life crisis life changing decision to swap our comfy and secure previous life for a new life of travel and adventure. I wrote some reflections at six months or so into our journey which you can read here and I have now updated those reflections here with how we feel after nearly two years on the road.
We have so far visited fourteen countries, travelled 12754 miles and spent about six months volunteering via Helpx with seven different hosts. It’s safe to say we have settled into our life on the road pretty well and have no plans as yet to return to a more conventional life. In fact, we really don’t know what we want to do in the future. We have some ideas which are floating about in the background which may, or may not, ever materialise so we’re quite content living our vagabond lifestyle for the foreseeable future. There is still so much more we want to see in Europe and beyond.
When we returned to the UK in April 2017 to visit family and friends and have the annual MOT on the van we revisited the question of what to do with all our ‘stuff’ which had been locked up in a storage container since the start of our trip in April 2016. In short, after much procrastination, deliberation, rumination, consideration, contemplation and any other ‘ation’ you can think of we gave it all away to a charity bar a few pictures and one small plastic box which we are keeping at my parents house. You can read about that here. It was a bold move for us and only time will tell if it was the right decision.
For now though, the journey continues…..
About us
Januar 2016
We are Jane and Tim and we have decided to leave behind our conventional and predictable life to go and find some adventure by exploring Europe in our motorhome. We have always hankered after a bit of freedom and the opportunity to explore new areas for an extended period. We’ve never been fans of trying to cram everything in to a two week holiday just to return to work exhausted and in need of another holiday. Well now we are going to have the time to do things differently. We want to slow it all down and have the time to really experience new and interesting places.
Our trip, or ‘the trip’, as it is now known has been in the making for the last five years. That may sound a long time, and it is a long time, but we really really really, and I mean really, wanted to be in a position to give up work and create a lifestyle out of travelling for an extended period of time without having to return to work after say a year, unless we chose to. We want to live our life, for the first time, on our own terms.
So, we’ve saved and engineered our life over that period of time to enable us to travel in our motorhome for as long as we find the life fulfilling. That may be three months or it could be several years – who knows until we try it. Better to have tried and found it doesn’t suit than missed the opportunity of fabulous adventures and an agreeable lifestyle.
When I say we have engineered our life, what I mean by that is, we drastically cut down on our living expenses, stopped buying stuff we didn’t need, massively reduced our stuff and our house will be rented whilst we’re on the road. We will, in effect, be homeless! But we do have our home on wheels who is affectionately known as ‘Ollie’. Why? Because we used him for ‘ollie’ days. Well now ‘Ollie’ is going to be on one major ‘Ollieday’!
That’s not to say we aren’t on a budget, we most definitely are, and we are going to have to be creative to live within our budget but we ‘think’ it’s doable – we’ll see. We are going to do some house/pet sitting and some volunteering along the way to help us to meet new people, learn new skills and live like a local for a short while. Having read numerous blogs on this lifestyle and all the fabulous people out there who have divulged all their expenses we have come up with ‘our number’ and hope that we can live within it. Time will tell. The clock is ticking. We are homeless on 8th April 2016 when our tenants move in so that’s when the adventure begins.
bonvanageblog 