It was suggested to me on Facebook to write a post on what my best and worst moments were in the van, so here they are… (if you have any requests for blog posts just leave them in the comments and I’ll see what I can do)
I’d like to finish on a positive note, so I’ll start with the Worst Moment...
There is no real stand alone terrible moment that I can recall, which I suppose is a good thing as it means there was never a great traumatic event which has scarred my memories! I’ve had a few snotty notes left on the windscreen from people who didn’t like the fact that my “horrible, ugly van” was parked on their street. I suppose that could have got me down, but I just laughed it off as narrowminded snobbery; snotty notes only ever seem to come from affluent streets, so I imagine they’re from grumpy people who are bitter that they spent their best years grinding away behind a desk instead of chasing their dreams.
There's also the time I got the van stuck in a ditch in the middle of nowhere in Scotland; terribly misjudged my turning circle as I tried to pull over for the night after a five hour drive. I spent the next half hour chipping away in vain at the roadside with the ash trowel from my wood burner in a pathetic attempt to free myself. That was quite worrying because I thought I’d either have to pay for a recovery, or roll my van on its side as I tried to get it out. But in the end a couple of really helpful forestry commission chaps used their huge tree feller to scoop me out, so it actually turned into a “faith in humanity restored” kind of story.
I guess the closest thing to a worst moment that I can get to is the horrible stomach churning feeling when I used to turn the key in the ignition and nothing would happen! Mechanical difficulty, mainly stemming from the battery and starter system, plagued me for weeks at a time. It meant that sometimes I was left stranded, or that I’d have to let people down and cancel plans because I couldn’t get to them, I even had to cancel whole trips as I just didn’t trust the van to get me round without event. It’s a terrible feeling when you lose faith in your vehicle, but when that vehicle is also your home, it’s much worse.
I used to beat myself up quite badly whenever there were problems that I didn’t have the expertise or tools to fix on my own, which was silly as no one can do everything, and this used to feed into the overall angst of mechanical troubles. I started off with no mechanical skills at all, but now I’ve got a rough understanding of how most of the mysterious lumps of metal under the bonnet actually work, because I either had to fix them or pay someone else to, so I suppose there’s a silver lining, sort of?
The Best Moment is also hard to choose, but only because there are so many it’s difficult to narrow down; The new places I visited, the nights spent looking at the stars by a campfire, the strangers who became friends… But the moment that burned itself deepest into my memory is from the first few months after completing the conversion.
I was parked up on the Isle of Skye whilst doing a road trip around Scotland. I’d never been to Skye before, but it had been on my radar for a long time. Whilst there I had some amazing experiences; sunbathing by my own private waterfall pools, then watching snow cover the ground outside while my wood burner kept me toasty warm (both on the same day), hiking up and down mountains for days without seeing another soul, it was a trip full of incredible moments.
But then the time came when my itinerary dictated that I had to leave the island and head on to the next leg of my planned journey. That evening, on what was to be my last night on Skye, I spoke to a friend back home, explaining to her how gutted I was to have to leave somewhere which gave me such a strong sense of belonging.
That’s when she pointed out to me that I did not in fact have to move on from that spot unless I really wanted to. There was no one there to force me to stick to the itinerary that I’d created, and if I was enjoying it there so much why would I need to move on?
That was the moment that it properly clicked in my head that I was actually exactly where I wanted/needed to be at that moment in my life, and that from a daydream of fantasy, I’d somehow made it a reality. I was in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny cosy home, which I’d built myself, with no one to answer to but me!
It’s hard to put into words just how liberating that feeling was.
So instead of going to bed early that night and setting off on the next leg of my journey the following morning, I made myself a hot chocolate and walked up a hill to sit in the long grass, looked out over the sea loch at seals bobbing around between islands in the calm sea, listened to the drone of insects and the calls of the birds, and breathed in the scents of the heather and the salt on the breeze.
It was perfect.
