#tiny living

Not every day on the road can be an adventure. We need rest days, van repair days, life admin days.⁣

Days where we just chill, where we sleep in late and sip coffee gazing out of the back doors. Days where we clean the van from top to bottom or catch up on our work. Rainy days spent cosied up under blankets trying to catch the various leaks in our roof.⁣

Contrary to our little highlight reel on here it’s not all epic roadtrips and new discoveries; for every day of exploring there’s a down day closely following behind (or two, or three…). Constant motion is exhausting; travel sometimes overstimulating. We need time to process and digest just as much as we crave new experiences and changing scenery.⁣

As with everything in life it’s all about balance, and the days spent sipping coffee in bed are just as important as the days we’re out scaling mountains.

What I love are slow mornings, waking up to the sunlight stroking my face, climbing out of bed to make coffee and cracking open the door to appreciate the morning view. A little walk or a dip to refresh my body and mind, and a moment of contemplation before we consult our maps to plan the day’s route ahead.⁣

What I don’t love is being woken up at 7am by someone insistently honking their horn outside our van, stumbling groggily out of bed to be greeted by a police badge.⁣

They ask us where we’re from, what we’re doing here, and we reply that we’re sleeping and is there a problem?⁣

“No problem,” he says, and gets back in his police car and drives away. Well then why the hell wake us up?!⁣

These are the stories of two very different mornings parked in the same camp spot. Setting up camp is a little like flipping a coin; you never know what the result will be, but you can be sure it will make a good story.

Living in 6m² of space really teaches you to prioritise what you need in life.⁣

Before we started living in our van Ben lived in a small flat and I lived in a house full of clutter. During uni he moved into an even smaller caravan, and I eventually joined him. Downsizing came naturally to Ben, but it took me years to rid myself of all the junk I’d collected.⁣

By the time we moved into our van we had just a handful of possessions each, only the bare basics; clothes, plates, blankets, our all-important camera gear. Yet still we continued to minimise, leaving behind anything we hadn’t used in the past few months, choosing between spare parts and extra shoes and selecting only the most essential items for our trips.⁣

When we came to embark on our third long roadtrip we were surprised at how empty the back of our van looked- had we forgotten something? Where was all the stuff that had once filled that space? Were we just ultra minimalists now?⁣

Having just a few cupboards and shelves for storage has forced us to live minimally, but it’s also taught us what few essentials we really need. It seems frivolous to need more than one pair of jeans, several sets of cups or heaps of items for “just in case”.⁣

We’ve mastered the art of having just enough and we feel happier for it, our shoulders lighter without all these pointless possessions to weigh us down. Everything we need fits inside this van of ours, and everything we want is waiting right outside our door.

I wash everything by hand in our van- underwear, tops, cardigans, you name it, using whatever river or lake water is available nearby. We take a trip to the laundrette once every two months for our bedding and that’s it. It saves money, but I also enjoy doing it in some weird, old-fashioned way.⁣

Maybe because it reminds me of when I was younger. We were always moving between houses, hauling all of our stuff in this big old yellow Mercedes truck to and fro across two countries. I got used to washing my clothes by hand in the sink of whatever house we were in that month, always a different bedroom or kitchen to get used to.⁣

Maybe that lack of permanence in my formative years is what drove me to eventually get a van. Those memories of brushing my teeth in a lay-by or sleeping in the footwell of our truck seemed like hard done-by times back then, but I look back on them now with a sort of fondness and nostalgia at my unusual childhood.⁣

There are many hundreds of little reasons that made me want to travel; moments that seemed innocuous at the time now resonate with a deeper meaning and inspire me to push on further. Movement is in my soul; it makes my spirit restless to sit still.⁣

Often challenges can be the most defining points of our lives, whether we realise it at the time or only once they have been overcome. Maybe one day we’ll look back at these times we’re living now, cast a fresh gaze upon old memories, and I wonder which of those will stand out, and which will fade away.⁣

99% of the time our van is not as tidy as it looks in photos.⁣

It’s a tiny space, but it gets messy just as quickly as we can tidy it again.⁣

Camera gear, shopping and clothes end up scattered across the floor, cupboards open while we’re driving, things fall over and smash on bumpy roads.⁣

We squeeze as many days as we can out of our bedding and clothes before we have to wash them again, probably a few too many. When the cab’s not filled with puddles from the rain it’s usually coated in dust and mud.⁣

Living in a van is far from the idyllic few minutes in which we snap the photos for our feed, before the mess overwhelms us again.⁣

It’s challenging living your life in a 6m2 space shared between two of you. Our bed is our sofa, our office, our dining room; our kitchen doubles as a bathroom, a washroom, a hallway.⁣

But that hour in the morning when all the clutter is cleared away, ready for the day’s adventure ahead, and those moments when we crawl into a freshly made bed with clean sheets from the laundrette, it’s little moments like these that seem somehow amplified and make us appreciate the simple things in life all the more.