“Travelling” is a hard word to define, even harder to explain, to someone who has never done it before. The connotation of “travelling” is usually confined to gap year students and radical penniless drifters, something that you just do once in your life and move on from.
But travelling isn’t just a fad; it’s a lifestyle, a way of life, and to simply tell somebody you’ve “been travelling” is like to try and write a novel on a postage stamp, or to peer into the vast depths of the ocean through a tiny brass porthole. Yes, travelling is the most basic element of what we do, but trying to confine the past two years of your life into one sentence is frankly impossible.
“How was it? Did you have a good time?”
How can we even begin to answer that question, to explain the highs and lows and the stressful days and the difficult times and the euphoric moments and the joy of meeting like-minded people and the sweet taste of beers around a campfire or the dozens of sunsets we witnessed which all blur into one patchwork in our minds. To explain the cultures we experienced and the countries we lived through the eyes of locals and the sweet sweet sound of utter aloneness save for the rustling of fir trees and the imposing presence of tall, snowy peaks looming over you in the dark. The sense of hard-worn satisfaction at another challenge overcome or broken part repaired, another hard day on the road at its end. There were good times, but there were sure as hell some tricky ones too.
It was not a holiday, it was not a break from the real world: this is our world. The van is our shelter, the land the only map we need, the stars our only companions and the dirt tracks we call our home.
Even now with these words we cannot describe what travelling is or what it means, this mythical, magical realm where connections are made by chance encounters and bonds are forged by shared experiences. Where a perpetually changing horizon is the norm and we ride networks of roads like the blood surges through our arteries and veins.
#Follow the hashtag #Fromrusttoroadtrip to follow our van conversion project and our travels around Europe! 🌍
