Is this the beginning of the end of our van? Part 3

I just re-read part 1&2 to see where I left you off and man it was painful to read. This feels like the longest three weeks of our lives. Technically its less than 0.02% of our life yet it has aged us a good decade. I last wrote about us being in the 6 day wait for their external inspector to come check out our van and assess the damage. During these six days we had to try and prepare ourselves for all possible outcomes.

Up until this point EVERYONE involved was telling us that it was going to be a write off. Either too expensive to fix or unfixable (which just means really really expensive to fix - apparently nothing is actually unfixable). Obviously we are hoping and praying for the miracle outcome that the inspector will come and disagree with everyone and say “no this is economical to fix and not a write off”. However we have to be realistic and prepare ourselves for the possible outcomes.

1. It’s a write off as it's uneconomical to repair

2. It's a write off as it’s structural damage (aka very uneconomical to repair)

Both of these outcomes give us £4k to replace our van and both would take away our home. If it’s only a write off as it’s uneconomical, then we could buy our van back and repair the damage ourselves and the vehicle will always be categorised. If it’s structural then we wouldn’t be able to buy it back or repair with the pay-out as it would be far beyond that. What we didn't initially realise is that “buying it back” isn’t as simple as just keeping your van and taking less of a pay-out, they have to take your van to a salvage yard before paying you out and then you have to go to the salvage yard and arrange buying it back off them. When we realised this we were certain if it came to that we would not be buying back the same van they took. Every insurance person said it, every mechanic said it and even the inspector said it, the salvage yard would strip your van clean and sell you back a shell. I know because it happened to my car, some drug addled person driving on the wrong side of the road broke a red light and slammed into the side of me and wrote off my car, when I went to the salvage yard to collect my belongings from the boot they had already taken my brand new radio from the car, so I highly doubt solar panels and expensive kitchen stuff would remain in place if they took a bloomin car radio.

So from these two options we were being presented with, we either had to strip our van before insurance took it and then buy her back, repair her ourselves and rebuild her again. Option 2 we strip our van to the bone before insurance take her and buy a new van to try and rebuild her into. Both options felt like a fresh version of hell.

This was our reality in the week waiting for the inspector. Thinking about stripping our van, our baby. Removing every screw, prying off the tiles, deconstructing our kitchen, our bed, taking up the floor, taking down the cladding, pulling out the wires, taking out the vents. Thinking about having to do it all so carefully so we could salvage as many materials as possible. We were pricing the stuff we probably couldn’t salvage, thinking about what materials we would realistically need to buy again. Thinking about the other unknowns: Where we would do a deconstruction? Where could we store the inside of our van? Where would we live? How long would this take? Where could we do a rebuild? How could we fund a rebuild? Would we emotionally recover from having to take her apart when we just finished her? Now you can see why we aged a decade with these questions stewing in our mind.

The day of the inspection came, I had asked them to call me when they were on their way so I could make sure we were at the van. We headed to the garage early in the morning and spent the day loving her and making her look her best. She looked amazing, she smelt amazing, she was amazing. We were just hoping and praying we could convince this guy she was worth saving, she wasn't a write off. He called to say he was on his way, I was super friendly, he was too, I felt a glimmer of hope. We had heard so may horror stories about inspectors being pricks with clipboards just wanting to write off everything, however he seemed nice, dear God let him be nice.

Just before he arrives I brew a fresh pot of coffee, we have the sliding door open, we are sitting like a display in a museum “vanlife 2020” we want him to see this van is our home and showcase her in all her glory. He arrives to the garage, I hop out and greet him at our door, “Hi, you’re here to inspect our van?" (Big smiles Keely, be friendly Keely, make him like us Keely) he comes over, we start chatting, I offer him a fresh coffee, he's nice. He seems impressed with our van. The whole time he is doing inspection and assessing our van (I offer to help hold measuring stick for photos) we are letting him know what insurance have been saying to us the throughout the last 2 weeks. He says insurance are idiots who only know how to read a script (no offense to any insurance people out there). After assessing damage he admits its pretty expensive (over £3500) and if he arrived to a normal van it would 100% be a write off, but he can see its worth a lot more than a normal van. So he is going to report back to insurance to repair our baby, our home and advise not to write her off.

We couldn't believe it, after he left I cried from relief, but it wouldn’t feel real until it was all confirmed and all works were carried out and we were driving away in her. There were fears that there may be more issues not originally seen that insurance may write her off after all, so until we have her back to ourselves I would reserve final rejoicing. However, here I am typing this blog a week later in our van... sitting in our fixed van which we have just driven away in, the rejoicing can officially begin. Our miracle had happened, the long shot, the dream, the only positive outcome possible in a list of terrible outcomes. All the crossed fingers, all the positive vibes, all the luck, hopes and prayers sent our way from everybody who was following along what we were experienced all got us to this point. Throughout the entire process I was honest and against all odds and all advice, being vulnerable and honest worked in the end.

So is this the beginning of the end of our van? No, but it's the beginning of the end of our van in London for sure!! Almost losing her put a lot of things into perspective, and I tell you what, this baby deserves more than being chained to the streets of London so we can earn money. She deserves the open road, heck we deserve the open road! Why had we convinced ourselves we needed to save a big wad of money to be able to enjoy vanlife after a 18 months of grafting. What a waste of a year and a half of our life. Now we just need to figure out how we can sustain vanlife on the road when we finally break free of London, so we have lots of brainstorming to do and lots of big life chats (the norm for us). This is definitely the beginning of the end of this chapter of our lives, but man are we excited for what is coming next!

Is this the beginning of the end of our van? Part 2

So where did I leave you in part 1? Oh yeah, we had to get the van recovered to somewhere safe and to someone we trusted and get away from the family of the other driver.

As I had said previously the family of the other driver originally wanted to go outside of insurance and had brought a mechanic who seemed to think it was a straightforward fix, a one day jobby no problems! Before that I brought a video of the damage to the owner of our local garage who we trusted and he had said it is either completely fixable for less than a grand, or it’s a disaster. I sent the same video to my Uncle Ervine in Ireland, he said the same: it could be completely fine, but if that impact has damaged the structure of the van it’s a write off. Both my uncle and our mechanic said there was to way to know until they could actually look at it in person, but the family’s mechanic looked at it in person and instantly said it was fine.

So in my head we have dropped the van off at our trusted mechanic and tomorrow morning he will call me with a reasonable price to repair and we can contact the insurance company tell them how cheap it is, get them to pay to fix it and we will all be on our merry way. So we are at my sister’s and I eat for the first time in four days, because I’m trusting it’s all going to be ok, we just need to convince insurance it’s “economical” to fix, everything is going to be fine, that’s what I’m telling myself...

The next morning I wake myself up crying, I have got a bad feeling, but I’m just so tired and so drained and so deeply sad that this has all happened to us. Another night of no sleep, I’m like a zombie. Philly hasn’t slept a wink he has to go to work, we both feel like absolute shadows of ourselves, but are anticipating the garage to call us with good news so we can start the battle to get the van repaired. That morning I am in contact with school and the kids about their A-Level results, that distracts me for a while. Then I drive into town to run some errands, I softly cried the whole way there in my little courtesy van. I cried in the bank, I cried in the coffee shop, I cried in Tescos. But gentle cries, tears of exhaustion and sadness from everything we had experienced.

That afternoon I’m hanging out with my niece when I get the phone call from the garage. “Keely it’s not good news”. At first I think oh oh, the van has hit another vehicle while he tried to move it (we nearly hit another vehicle when unloading it at the garage). But no… it’s the damage, it’s worse than we thought. At this point I say to my niece, “why don’t you put on another episode of the cartoon” I can tell this is not a good conversation, I already feel churning in the pit of my stomach. Do you remember how adamant the family were that we didn’t need a second opinion after their fix? Now we know why eh!

I’m going to try and explain this to you all to the best of my layman ability. The damage to the wheel, like driving shaft, suspension etc. all those types of things is an easy fix and not too expensive for parts and labour. He can’t get it up on the ramp for full inspection until that is sorted because its currently undriveable. However what he can tell from down on the ground based on his inspection is that the structure the van is built upon (I don’t know what word it was) is out of line by 1mm, and apparently 1mm may not sound like a lot, but in mechanical terms it can be catastrophic. He can’t tell how catastrophic until its up on the ramp. So until it’s on the ramp he can't tell if it’s just a very expensive fix, or not fixable at all. He said I can pay to get it drivable to get it up on the ramp to see the full extent, but he doesn’t want to take my money off me when ultimately he thinks the insurance company are going to call it a write off either way.

He says I need to think long and hard about this and come to terms with the fact that this is most likely going to be classified as a write off. I tell him I will talk to Philly and call him back to see if we want him to fix the wheel or take his advice and accept reality. So I hang up. I can see my niece is entranced in the TV (a girl after my own heart) and I hear my sister in the office on a video meeting, I walk up the stairs out of earshot and eye shot of them both and I collapse in a heap on the floor and cry the deepest heaviest cry I’ve done in years. I wept, it was Biblical. I was so sad I was in physical pain, I felt like an Irish Banshee wailing at the loss of our van.

I hear the TV episode credits so I stand up and smile at my niece, she wants to play the Wii, so we turn on Just Dance and I am dancing to Britney Spears Toxic with a Wii remote while hot tears flow down my cheeks, every time my niece turns around I smile and do the dance moves exuberantly, then she turns away and cry some more. I take her to the park and we play Pokemon on the way. She’s happy, I’m happy to be with her, I love her so much. The second she leaves my side at the park I fall to pieces. I’m sobbing on the park bench like an absolute crazy person. Philly calls me, I fill him in. We agree we will just have to tell insurance we can’t get a quote for damage as we had hoped and see where we go from there. I don’t even remember what happened the rest of that day, I felt completely numb. I know it was another sleepless night, another day of eating little and crying a lot.

The next morning I have to call the garage and let him know not to waste time fixing the wheel, we will talk to insurance and see what we can do. I leave the house to make the phone calls, I know I can’t pretend not to be deeply sad, I need to allow myself to feel this. The garage agrees to look after the van and keep it there, he will bill insurance for storage. The insurance agree to get their own engineer to inspect the damage. She keeps insisting that they will collect it and take it to storage to be inspected, and I explain for the millionth time why they can’t take our van. I beg her to help me, to understand our situation, to actually put it on record what I’m saying so I don’t have to keep reliving this with every new person I speak to. I apologise numerous times for crying, “I’m sorry, but I’m just so sad, this van is our everything, all our savings, the last 9 months of our life, our home, our future plans” She says I don’t need to apologise she understands, she will see what she can do. She comes back to me and says that their engineer can come to the garage where the van is stored and he can inspect it and then we will take it from there. I thank her for not trying to take my home. I tell her I want to be there when he comes to inspect it so I can show him our beautiful conversion. That was on Friday, the inspector isn’t coming until Thursday.

So now we wait. Everything is still so uncertain. We are currently just trying to anticipate all the possible outcomes that come from this, and very few of them are desirable. All because someone drove into our parked vehicle at full speed on a long straight road. It doesn’t make sense, none of this makes sense, but some day it will. Some day we will look back and understand why this all had to happen.

Is this the beginning of the end of our van? Part 1

So our van dream began over a year ago before we headed off backpacking South America. When we returned we spent two months designing and building our van to get it liveable, then the next six months living in it on the streets of London while finishing the build. On Sunday the 9th August we finally fitted the last poppers on our curtain and hung our second rail in the kitchen. We had drilled a hole in our wooden dust brush to hang it up and stood back and said, wow we’ve actually finished everything we planned for this build, finally! We were parked up on a street nestled between two parks down by the canals where we finally felt safe and like we had a home base while we did London life. Then three hours later someone not paying attention crashed into our home.

The impact was pretty hefty, at first I assumed our entire van was crushed, the noise from crash was so loud. But my instinct was to hop out (I was sitting in the front) and run to check on the other driver. It was a young girl, I asked if she was ok, did she need an ambulance, I kept trying to reassure her, at that moment our concern was for the other person involved, the van was secondary to us, I kept saying it was ok over and over again. As I said, we were nestled between two parks, and right outside our van people had been setting up for a party all day, there were gazebos, food, drinks music, nearly 100 guests. At this point most of them come sprinting over, it turns out the driver is a family member, and so began the carnage. Somehow we who were parked in a parked vehicle were getting blamed for this. Lots of angry family members being aggressive towards us. Shouting in my face, making accusations, being exceptionally and unnecessarily rude. When I said we were being completely reasonable and they had no reason to shout at me one of them shouted in my face “i’m not shouting though, am i shouting” I was like... you are literally shouting right now. It had descended into chaos to the point where bystanders had to come and intervene to say they needed to stop being like this to us and just swap insurance details. In the end Philly had to call the police because the family were now being verbally abusive towards the other bystanders.

One of the other bystanders pointed out that there were numerous cars parked on double yellow lines and that the driver should report that to the police (I had heard the driver say earlier that was her sisters car, parked opposite our van, but no-one else knew I had heard that) So Philly tried to take a photo of the car as the sister hopped in the seat to drive away, we were just trying to get photos of the scene for the insurance/police. At this point she revved the engine and rammed into Phillly until the point where he had to hop off her bonnet. Then everyone started shouting at him for standing in front of the car, and yet again somehow we were to blame for the situation even though she intentionally drove into him and sped away so he couldnt simply take a photograph of the scene.

The whole time we are being calm and trying to dissipate the situation, I kept checking on the other driver, at this point family members had pushed her car off the road into a carpark at the end. When I had first went to check on the driver (she was in a convertible so I could speak freely) I told her she was in shock and that it was ok it was just an accident and not to worry, she said she was having flashbacks as she had been in a crash last week and it was all coming back to her. I reassured her she safe and it was going to be ok. None of the family members know I was told this because later lots of them kept saying she just got her licence and this was her first time out in the car. I just smiled and nodded and said I understood, as I knew if I disagreed and admitted I knew the truth this was her second accident in a week I would just receive more aggressive behaviour. The police called back and as soon as we told them the car was off the road they said everything else was for the insurance claim and that they wouldn’t be coming to the scene. So at this point we decide to ring our insurance company (thankfully between one of the bystanders and the only calm family member there they managed to get our insurance details swapped) Most family members have went back to the celebrations in the park and we are sitting in our van talking to insurance, and man it was not a good conversation.

It was a Sunday evening, so we are talking to the out of hours team. We explain about the accident, the damage to the wheel etc., describe the scene. Ultimately when all his questions have been answered he says our van is a write off. I say, no it isn’t you haven’t even seen it! He said based on the description of damage his matrix is telling him its a write off, they will come collect it now to be taken to storage and then it will be scrapped. I was like I don’t think you understand the current situation. So explained to him about it being a conversion, argued with him about what classifies it as a write off. He kept saying the words “uneconomical to repair”. So I asked him what classifies as uneconomical, because if your telling me this damage is going to cost more to repair than the value of my van I’m telling you right now you are wrong. He kept saying ”it’s a mix of factors in the matrix” This conversation went on for a long time, with a lot of tears and a lot of him not being able to help or give me any real answers, all the meanwhile the family are all singing and dancing in the park outside our van, while we are trying to figure out what on earth is going to happen our home. Ultimately this guy admits if we put the claim through with him now he will have to send someone out to collect the van and put it into storage and he cant help it because he is out of hours. So we decide his option is obviously unacceptable so we will call back in the morning and sleep in the van tonight.

So we lie in bed, kept awake by the loud party and the impending doom of potentially getting our van taken away and basically count down the hours until the insurance company opens and we can talk to someone who actually knows something. Philly just keeps saying, what have we done to deserve this, we are innocent, why are we the ones that are potentially losing everything. I’m trying to stay positive externally, but internally I am feeling everything he is. These feelings of fear, injustice and deep sadness all set to the back beat of their happy music and late night party.

Monday morning comes and the drivers insurance company call me, tell me she has accepted 100% liability and they want to sort it out directly for me. So I explain everything, I tell her what our insurance company said, she is very kind understanding, supportive. First 30 minutes of that conversation I totally believe they are going to come repair my van for me, she understands it has so much love put into it, so many months, so much money, she is going to help me. I feel so relieved, then literally she says “Based on everything you have provided, it is coming up as a total loss and we will take your van to be crushed”.... I nearly vomited. I was speechless, I couldnt believe the words coming out of her mouth, she was even more heartless than my own insurance, at least they didn’t say they wanted to crush it. I was like I don’t understand you said you understood, she said “unfortunately it is a total loss on our system”. I was like what the flip does that mean!?? “Unfortunately we will take your van to storage where we will categorise it’s damage and then take it to be crushed” All in her happy upbeat voice. I want to kill her (no offense).

For the next five minutes the phone call is awkward silence with intermittent sobbing and her being less than helpful. They insist I send them photos of the damage as I keep insisting it is fixable and not a write off. They say the will categorise the damage based on my photos. I said what if I send you photos and you call it a write off, then you are going to come take our van, you cant take our van! Queue the next thirty minutes of me explaining how much more valuable our van is than the money she thinks it is. I tell her I need to know how much she thinks it is worth so I can find out the damage cost and convince you its worth saving. She said there were many factors and wouldn’t give me a straight answer about how much she thought it was worth. We leave it that I will get a call back in two hours after their engineers evaluate the damage based on photos she wants me to send and she will have a value for our van.

So I wait a few hours and call back to see if they have a price for my van, they do. It’s half of what we’ve spent on it, almost ¼ of its actual resale value. I tell this new girl I’m speaking to how absolutely unacceptable this is, I explain everything to her again, I’m so emotional at this point, I feel absolutely broken. I keep insisting we can prove all the money we’ve spent on the van, that its worth more than they say. She says there are two routes we can go down, either they can reimburse the money we’ve spent on conversion or they can match like for like prices for similar van conversions on the market. So I collate all this evidence, money spent, link similar vans for sale, send numerous photos of the inside of our van and then I call back later that day to see if they have came up with a new value (My hope being that once they acknowledge its true worth I can convince them it is economical to fix after all) Then the guy I talk to says the girl that I spoke to earlier was new to the role and she was wrong that they don’t “deal with this type of claim” I was like, what does that mean!? “It means we don’t deal with this type of claim”, yes, but what does that actually mean, what do you mean you don’t deal with it? “It means we don’t deal with this type of claim”.... I was like, look man I know this isn’t your fault but you are literally just reading a script back to me you really need to help me out here, just be straight with me what do you mean by that. “Unfortunately we don’t deal with these type of claims you will have to contact your own insurance company” I was like, just tell me, are you saying that you aren’t willing to compensate for the conversion? I just need to know what this actually means. “you will have to deal with your own insurance company” Man you need to help me out here, if my insurance company tell you they think its worth more than what you have originally told me, are you going to pay that? “I couldn’t possibly answer that, we don’t deal with these type of claims” When you say ‘deal’ do you mean pay or just that you don’t have the expertise to evaluate it. “I mean we don’t deal with these”.... I choke on my own tears, I’m silent for ages because one phone call tells me we can get increased value, the next one tells me she was wrong and they don’t “deal”, so I’m about to lose the plot at this point. I tell him i don’t want to be rude so I am going to hang up now, I hang up and tell Philly everything.

We wait to call our insurance company the next morning because at this point I’m pretty broken. The next morning the father of the driver show up at our van with a mechanic offering to fix it for us outside of insurance. We tell him insurance have said there may be chassis damage and think it’s a write off. Before the mechanic even gets down to the wheel he says “no chassis damage” and then writes a list of the parts needed to fix the wheel, steering arm, suspension etc. Tells the dad to buy these parts and he will have it back driving on the road in one day. We are a bit uncertain because we feel like it was diagnosed very quickly, but obviously we want to just get it fixed. So we agree in theory, but say wait to buy parts and let us think about it and we will call you if we are happy to go ahead outside of insurance. The dad looks me dead in the eye, “no insurance, why you say insurance, no insurance I’m paying”. I’m like, ok, I agree not to go insurance, we just need time to talk to them. He said to call them right now and cancel the claim. I said I would later, he said to do it now and he would wait, and I was like calm down I’m willing to do it, but I’m going to be put on hold for ages you know what insurance companies are like. (I’m feeling very intimidated at this point) Then the other guy that’s with the mechanic tells him to back down and let us take the time to think about it and call them later.

So Philly and I go for a walk and we talk about it. We decide obviously we just want our van fixed but we have a bad feeling about it all, and he needs to go to work the next day and doesn’t like the thought of leaving me to deal with it all on my own. So we send them a message that we are happy to go ahead with it off insurance if we can get a second opinion after from our own mechanic and if they can help with a mode of transport for Philly to get to go to work as he has already lost work that week. We think these are very reasonable requests and spend the next couple hours assuming this is all going ahead.

Well roll forward a couple of hours and we get a text message from the mother claiming she has it on good authority our van hasn’t moved from that spot in six months, implying we are lying about having to go to work and refusing to allow us to get a second opinion. So I’m furious at this point. We have been nothing but honest and kind and trusting throughout this entire process, I had even texted the daughter she checked how she was and asked the father again earlier that day. We are trying to be good people and they are accusing us of being liars. So I text her back saying our van has GPS and I can prove we have moved, we were in Ireland for three months and then have been at the beach every weekend and philly takes it to work up north nearly every day, all of which can be proven with GPS tracking and photographic evidence, so her source is clearly misinformed. To which she replies ok, we can get AA to inspect after. No apology, no nothing, I’m really distressed, and now I feel like I don’t trust them at all. So I say AA is not sufficient as they wont be able to get it up on a ramp to check for structural damage which is what our concern is.

We go visit our friend on her boat and talk about everything that is going on, my anger dissipates, and we all assume they will agree and the next day this will all be over. We head back to the van feeling better, however an hour later, three of them show up at our van furious with our simple requests. How dare we ask for a second opinion, they know we have never moved our van, Philly doesn’t have a job, maybe they think it was probably damaged to begin with. We spend a long time trying to get them to see the truth of the situation, they are not the victims of some manipulation, we are being completely transparent throughout this entire process. We can provide evidence of Philly’s work. They finally accept this and say to avoid going through insurance they agree to get a courtesy car, Philly says they are too expensive we don’t expect you to pay that I can get the train, he is trying to calm the situation and keeps saying “Peace and love man, we all want a positive outcome” he invites them to come see our van explain why we all want the same thing we just want it fixed so we can all move on, none of us want insurance because they keep saying they will take our home away. Everyone leaves all happy and smiley, we agreed to no second opinion simply because we just wanted this to be over. Everyone goes on their merry way and we think the next day their mechanic will come collect it and fix it and everything will be done. So I call insurance company tell them they want to do it outside of insurance, I told her I was a bit worried about it all and she said rather than close the claim, she would put it on hold and then once it is fixed you can call back and close the claim.

We are lying in bed, absolutely exhausted but grateful it looks like there is an end in sight. Then I get a text message... Hey Keely sorry to text so late at night. We’ve decided we wont be fixing the van anymore and i know you’ve already been in touch with insurance. If you want it will have to go through insurance.

Well we are in absolute shock, because hours before they left us knowing that if we went through insurance we would loose our home, and they with good conscious have decided to leave us with either paying to fix it ourselves or being homeless. At this point we realise we just need out of there because they know where we are and the obviously don’t want to go through insurance either or they wouldn’t have been down her strong arming us so much, so they have said this thinking we will back down. We lay there saying they couldnt get away with it, we need to get somewhere safe and then call back insurance to let them know we are going through the claim after all. But we can’t be here when they realise that because they could be down here with bats for all we know. So we lay awake for the third night in a row, only this time actually frightened for our own safety. The next morning my friend and I went to our local garage and explained everything that had happened. Our mechanic told us we could bring the van there and figure it out. So we spend the morning trying to find a recovery vehicle that can take a LWB van and that can take it immediately. We finally find one and by lunch time our van is taken somewhere safe and we call insurance company to let them know we have had it recovered as it was no longer safe on the road. I told them our mechanic is going to look at it and give a quote to fix it (at this point I believe the damage isn’t too bad because the families mechanic told us it would be fixed in a day) and they are satisfied to wait to hear back from me. I arrange for a courtesy vehicle to get us around while we wait for it to get checked over and fixed and I go pick it up.

That evening Philly and I drive our little courtesy van up to stay at my sisters awaiting to hear back from the garage. That was four days ago. There is a lot more to share, but I feel like this is blog is ridiculously long at this point and I’m super drained, so stay tuned for part 2 if you haven’t given up on this very long story already.

What made us think about vanlife?

The plan to live in a van was officially born in May 2019, we were having plenty of big life talks (aren’t we always), but it wasn't long before it became a reality. We had booked flights to South America for a 6 month adventure July 2019 – January 2020. We knew returning from South America our life would be in a state of flux. Firstly our apartment lease would be up in January (a friend was subletting from us while we were away), so we would have to find a new place to live. Originally we thought I would have to find a new teaching job, but thankfully my school offered me a career break so this concern didn’t become a reality. Alongside this Philly would also be venturing into the self-employed world and we were very unlikely to have disposable income upon our return. So, prior to us venturing off to South America Philly and I were talking a lot about what our life would look like when we got back and this was when van life became a conversation. I have always wanted to live in a camper van; throughout my teenage years all my presents were campervan themed and I even used my student loan to buy a 1975 T2 VW that I have shamefully abandoned to rust on my parents driveway for the best part of a decade. The point being, I've loved all things #vanlife long before hashtags were a thing. Philly however, always said he would only ever travel in a more modern van which used to horrify me (yet here we are in a 2011 Citroen Relay lol).

These talks were never a reality just abstract chats, however, when we talked about returning to London and hopping back on the conveyor belt of debt that is the London rental market, all of a sudden, the last decade of jokey chats started to become genuine conversations. Returning to London after South America was going to be tight, we knew it would cost a lot of money to put down first months rent and a deposit on an apartment then we would be tied into a rental agreement eating up our income. We realised we would not be able to save money for future adventures while paying rent in London and ultimately, we wouldn’t have financial freedom for Philly to set up something of our own.

So, this is where the idea of van life began, a way to escape the cycle of debt we would get ourselves into in London, however, it was only the igniting spark, this alone would not be enough to turn it into a blazing reality. Our conversations turned to more than money, the van became about much more than a solution to economic issues, but about philosophical, emotional and environmental issues. Pretty much every value we hold dear became intrinsically linked to our reasoning behind choosing to pursue van life. I feel like there is a much deeper blog to come on all this issues, but for now, that is where it started, so this is where I will end.