How To Live And Travel Full Time In A Van?
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It’s been around three years since we first moved into a van together, and Aidan and I have been full-time on the road ever since! Our vanlife journey has taken us around the UK and Europe, where we are now slowing things down and pouring energy into our off-grid land in Portugal.
So, we’re here to share all on what it’s like to live and travel full-time in a van, because it’s really far more straightforward than what’s plastered around the internet.
There’s a lot to think about living full-time in a van! Some considerations include managing waste, monitoring water usage, and having consistent electrical power. It is, however, an ideal lifestyle choice for those who want to cut down on living costs, have affordable travel, and spend more time outside.
When we meet new people, or even catch up with family members, we’re often asked what it’s like to travel full-time on the road, so this blog is us unveiling the trials and tribulations of living in a home on wheels, and how you can do it too! Waking up in new locations is exciting, and having all the essentials like a toilet and a kitchen space is comforting, and means we can have our morning cuppa anywhere we take our van!
If you’ve been considering transiting to a composting toilet, or are looking for a toilet for your van conversion, check out our Simploo Composting Toilet Blog and discount code here!
If you don’t have time to read our entire blog, you can skip to the section you’re most interested in by using the table below:
How To Live And Travel Full Time In A Van?
Anyone choosing to live and travel full-time in a van will have their own reasons for doing so. For us, it was to cut down on living costs, make less of an impact on our planet, and see more of the world. There’s no ‘ultimate’ way to live full-time in a campervan, but there are a few things we think are worth considering before jumping straight in and making a potentially large investment in a campervan.
Test Out The Lifestyle
Before diving straight into living full-time on the road in a van, it may be wise to borrow or rent a campervan first to see if you actually enjoy it! You’ll likely need to cut down on a lot of belongings to fit into a smaller space, so this is a big consideration if you own a lot of things. Vans may seem like big vehicles, but once there’s a toilet, shower, kitchen, lounge area, storage, and a bed built inside, they can seem pretty small!
That’s why I’d advise anyone thinking of moving into a van full-time to use a rental service and take a test trip away for a week or two to test out if the lifestyle is a match made in heaven or a bit too much hassle! PaulCamper was initially Germany’s first campervan sharing platform, but now they operate in the UK too and offer great campervan rental deals. If you own a campervan and want to make some extra pennies, you can hire out your van with PaulCamper too!
Choose The Right Vehicle
There are SO many different types of campervans and panel vans available, and when you’re new to the vanlife world, it can be hard to know which one is best suited to you. The first van we lived in was an 04 plate Mercedes Sprinter called Jim, and he was ideal for solo travelling, but wasn’t built with the consideration of an extra person on board as Aidan had built out the van before we even met! My first van was a small Transit called Dave which definitely was NOT suitable for the two of us!
We went on to sell both vans, put our funds together, and purchase a 2016 Sprinter called Pat who we lived in for 6 months and sold as we had drained our money during the build (something to be careful of if you’re building your own camper!). For the last 2 years or so, we’ve been living in a 1993 Mercedes 410D called Peppé, who is the inspiration behind our name ‘the hippy bus’. He’s a slow, expensive lump to run, but we love his character, twin rear wheels, and the fact he just keeps going!
When choosing a vehicle for your camper conversion or purchase, be sure it has everything you need, as the last thing you want to be doing is regretting your purchase only a few months down the line. That’s why renting a camper is a great way to find the best vehicle for you.
Be Ready To Face Challenges
Vanlife isn’t always easy. We’re fully aware of all the ‘insta-perfect’ pictures that seem to endlessly circulate the internet, but the fact of the matter is that vanlife means a lot more than finding an idyllic park up on a beach and slipping into speedos and a bikini. There’s security to think about, along with things such as vehicle maintenance, sourcing water, having consistent electrical power, and finding suitable places to park (more on this later).
Challenges we’ve had to face have been frozen water lines from our winter adventure in Scotland (yes, we should have known better), black ice, our diesel heater packing in, finding enough dry wood to heat our log burner, and getting stuck more than a few times in our van life journey.
Being ready to face these challenges and carrying items like a shovel and basic tools can make all the difference. Aidan has always rated Ryobi tools, and you can see the best deals on the tools we’ve bought and found most useful over on our Amazon store by clicking here.
Join The Community
There is an increasing number of individuals living differently, and with the cost of living rising, it’s becoming more common for people to seek out alternative living arrangements. When you first start out on the road, it’s normal to feel nervous and even apprehensive about the vanlife journey ahead.
Whether you are travelling the UK, US, Europe, or elsewhere in your van, there will be others on a similar adventure in their home on wheels, so it’s a great chance to meet new souls and even lifelong friends. Joining the community and sharing stories around a campfire or going on a wood run together helps us reconnect with those around us, and you may even learn some new vanlife tips and tricks as well!
Get Outside
It can be tempting to stay inside your campervan, especially when the weather isn’t playing ball outside. Getting out into the wilderness, however, is why so many people choose to live life on the road in the first place. Nothing beats waking up to a gorgeous lakeside sunrise or being able to dive straight into the cool, salty ocean first thing in the morning.
We’re excited to adventure off and see more of Portugal, as we’ve been spending most of our time on the land, building a tree deck, and prepping areas for future constructions. If you’re visiting a new area and want to step out of your comfort zone and try something new, we would highly recommend using GetYourGuide as they are a platform offering unique travel experiences all around the world.
Source An Income
Sourcing a reliable income from the road can be hard, there’s no doubting that. It has taken some time for us to reach a stable income, and as we have various income streams, this can vary from month to month. Both Aidan and I get most of our work on the platform Upwork which I go into more depth on our blog ‘How We Work Online Successfully’, but between us, we’ve had a range of online incomes from teaching English to transcribing audio.
For anyone interested in teaching English online as a foreign language, I would highly recommend using the platform Cambly. This is the platform I used for a year to support our travels on the road, and I have a referral code below where we can both earn $30 if you get approved to work on Cambly Kids to teach little ones!
Get Prepared For Each Season
Living and travelling full-time on the road in a van, as I mentioned earlier, comes with some challenges! One of the biggest considerations we didn’t realise we’d have to give quite so much thought to is year-round weather changes. When we are in the UK, it’s often windy, grey, and rainy, so we have to monitor our electricity usage on low-solar days and be sure there aren’t any leaks anywhere in the van.
When we’re in Portugal, however, it’s a different story…
Instead, it’s a battle to stay cool, and keep as much direct sun off the van as possible! We will eventually have a canopied space for the van to park on the land, but until then, we rely heavily on our awning and plenty of calippos! If you are currently at the beginning of a van build or are still drawing up designs, be sure to consider the weather conditions you’ll likely be facing.
Utilize Public Transport
Sometimes, parking right in the city centre in a campervan to explore can be tough, especially with the LEZ, ULEZ, and other restrictions coming into play throughout the UK and Europe. That’s where Trainline can come in to make things a little easier. Both Aidan and I have always loved train and bus journeys; there’s something so peaceful about sitting back and relaxing while somebody else does all the hard work!
We’ve both used Trainline since we were in school and still trust the site today to bring us the best deals, exactly when we need them. When we were in Scotland for 5 months a couple of winters ago, we visited the Glenfinnan Viaduct (any HP fans out there!?) and we hope to return one day to take a train journey through the magnificent Scottish scenery.
Safety First
If you’re thinking of moving full-time into a van, there’s no point in leaving all safety precautions in your house and walking away! Just like anything, a campervan has to be safe, and no matter how boring we may sound, we’ll always spread the importance of campervan safety. Installing electrical systems, gas, and water in a campervan are big tasks, and they need to be done correctly to avoid any issues further down the line.
Thankfully, there is a lot of great information online, including step-by-step videos for installing certain applications. Just be sure to take your time, and make sure to kit out your van in the safest, most securest, and also effective way possible to get the most out of your camper and keep you and your loved ones safe.
Make Memories
Vanlife has led us to some amazing locations over the past few years, but Aidan and I often talk about our future and where our travels may take us once we’ve got our land in a solid position, where we’re collecting rainwater, growing vegetables, and restoring biodiversity back to our Portuguese forest.
We can see ourselves backpacking one day and exploring Asia by island-hopping and taking small flights from one location to the next. If you’re thinking of booking a trip via a plane soon, you can use the flight aggregator below to find the best ticket rates. WayAway also offers cashback on flights, accommodation, and more so you can save some pennies on your next trip away!
Why Choose Vanlife?
There are many reasons why you may be thinking of transiting to life on the road, and in all honesty, choosing vanlife has been one of the best decisions either of us has ever made. Without taking the plunge and trusting our guts that we were making the right decision, despite all the negative noise around us, we wouldn’t have found each other, brought Cali into our lives, or stumbled upon a 5-acre plot of dreamy land in the mountains.
If we’ve learned one major thing about life on the road, it’s that it’s unpredictable! Sometimes, it will throw anything and everything at you, but it’s when we choose to tackle and overcome these challenges that we truly grow and evolve. Below are some of the reasons we think vanlife is an awesome lifestyle choice, and although it’s not something we will do full-time forever, it’s a way of travel that we will continue to turn to for the foreseeable!
Cut Down On Living Costs
Living costs are increasing, and there’s no sign of things like food getting cheaper anytime soon. The cost of living in a house or flat and paying rent or a mortgage seems to be getting more expensive as time goes on too. Manufactured campervans and retro campers tend to carry a higher price, but if you are up for doing a van conversion yourself, it’s possible to buy a cheaper wagon for only a couple of thousand and do the hard graft yourself! You can then transform it into exactly what you want, putting windows where you need them, installing vents, and painting the van a fresh colour, as shown in the video below:
This is what Aidan did for his first campervan conversion, buying a rusty 2004 Mercedes Sprinter for £1k and converting it for a further £4k, creating a mortgage-free home for only £5,000. Don’t worry though, I’m not going to drift past the expenses we have living on the road! Depending on how far we travel, our monthly fuel costs range between £400 - £600, and along with bills like internet, phones, and our weekly food shop, we spend a further £300-ish.
That means we get to live comfortably in our van full-time and travel to all the places we want to see for less than £1,000/per month. Everyone’s expenses will be different, but this is an idea of what our living costs are, living full-time on the road in a van, and it’s WAY cheaper than when we both used to rent flats!
Travel With Everything You Need
Having everything we could possibly need on board our bus gives us great peace of mind. We never know when one of us could have a flare-up, and our Crohn’s and Endometriosis would be a lot harder to deal with if we didn’t have a composting toilet or full-size bed permanently in place in our van. It’s also reassuring knowing we can head off into the wilderness and stay charged up with the help of our solar panels, cook tasty meals as we have LPG, and sleep comfortably under the stars.
Authentic Way To Travel
Exploring new places in a van is such a unique way of travelling. Flying to new locations is fun and exciting, but we have had countless occasions of meeting locals in small villages as we’ve been driving across central Spain, or finding hidden loch-side tracks in Scotland. It’s small but magical moments like these that made us fall in love with life on the road. Travelling by van also means you get to experience what a place is like first-hand, just like a local as you drive through busy city centres, or hide away on dusty, sand-coloured tracks.
Work Less, Live More
We still work online to fund our travels, but our van lifestyle gives us the flexibility we need to work less and live more. Cutting down our overall living expenses means we don’t need as much money, so we can spend more time doing the things we enjoy most like hiking, planting, exploring, and generally being big kids in the wilderness!
We find Upwork has been the most successful platform for us to find a stable, remote, income. But another great platform is Cambly, which I talked a little about earlier in this blog. You can sign up for Cambly by clicking our referral button below and earn an additional $30 if you get approved to tutor on Cambly Kids!
Connect With Nature
Spending time in nature has always been a part of both mine and Aidan’s lives since we were children, and we’re grateful to have parents who encouraged mindful time in nature - maybe that’s one of the reasons we feel so at home in the trees in our 20’s! With technology advancing, and more people spending time looking at phones, tablets, and computer screens, it feels like our society is disconnecting from the world around us. Being outside most of the time means we aren’t turning to our phones every 5 minutes and is also ideal for our dog Cali, who we travel with full-time.
We’ve recently been learning about grounding, which is a technique of reconnecting with the earth and aligning the electrical energy that passes through us. A simple way to do this is by walking barefoot, as rubber soles block the earth’s frequencies. There have been so many scientifically proven studies of the incredible effects grounding has on wound healing, inflammation, sleep and more, that are well worth a read! Practising grounding daily is a great motivator for ensuring time is spend outside in the glorious colors, smells, and sounds the wilderness has to offer.
Closing Thoughts
The way in which you chose to live and travel full-time in a van will be personal to you, your needs, and wants from the lifestyle. There are so many #vanlife tags all over social media with seemingly ‘perfect’ shots of vans at beachside locations, but our advice would be to try and avoid getting swept into that aesthetic.
It’s easy to feel pressured by what others are posting and doing online, but remember to live your own life, fill it with special memories, and share moments with the ones you love!
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