Gibbs Gap Year

When planning our trip, it was very difficult to decide what size water tank, leisure battery, and gas canister to buy because we didn't know how long each would last. It's quite important because it affects how long we can stay off grid before finding somewhere to stop and refill. In the end, we just went with whatever we had the space for or could afford.  Here's what we have and how long it lasts... Water What we have: 20L water and waste Average lifespan: 2-3 days We buy bottled water to drink and use the water from our jerry can for hot drinks, cooking, and washing up. We try to be minimal with what we use, but on average it lasts around 2.5 days. As that's not a lot of time and all we could fit under the sink, we carry another 20 litre jerry can in our back box for topping up when we run out. That gives us a comfortable 4-6 days of being able to travel without worrying about finding a place to refill. Electricity What we have: 120...

For our generation, it seems we are eternally stuffed. If we secure an amazing career and work up in it, we should've gone travelling or experienced other parts of life. Yet if we experience these other parts of life, like happiness, we are penalised in the work place for placing our life experiences above our career choices. It constantly feels like a lose lose situation. I'm sure it's always been the case in some way or another, but the pressures of social media, university degrees, being on trend, and the now infamous FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) that has sprung up with the onset of social media, I certainly feel that our mental and physical wellbeing as a generation is suffering.  One reason we decided we needed to make a change and begin our adventure of living in a van and driving around Europe was that we both felt we had stagnated in our lives. Not so much with each other, though obviously that change in a relationship from new romance to long term life sente...

When we see other blogs of people travelling, they seem to be fortunate enough to be able to work online while they're away, which funds their trip. Granted, they don't have as much freedom as we do, but they have a constant income stream- a luxury we don't have. We've given up our jobs and are funding our entire trip from the profit we made selling our flat. For that reason, we planned on following a strict budget so that we could see as many places as possible in the time that we had allowed. To calculate what we can spend each week, we divided the amount of money we have allocated to the trip (£4500) by the amount of weeks that we could be away (36). That gave us an average weekly allowance of £125 that we record on a spreadsheet. Food and diesel consume most of the budget, only allowing us around £20 per week for leisure activities, which we consider to include eating out. For the first month or so, when we were enjoying the novelty of van life, that worked ...

We were feeling pretty down on our luck when we arrived at the parking area just outside of Salamanca. It was a long drive to get there, we'd been battling with rain, fog, steep mountains and of course, the leaking van. We needed an upswing.  We just about managed to guess the right location of the parking spot, and trundled down to it to see another camper there. We did our usual dance of negotiation between parking for privacy, and parking in proximity close enough to elicit conversation should our neighbours be friendly.  It was open the door to let Bailey out time, and to have a little look around ourselves. A young Spanish chap came over from the camper to Matt to say how cool he thought our van was. Good, the ice was broken, so at least it wouldn't be an uncomfortable stay. We were only planning on being there for the night anyway, as we were heading rapidly down towards Portugal to meet a friend on holiday.  Anyway, as we got chatting about Bailey, his...

It sounds dramatic, but on at least two occasions I honestly thought we might die or have a serious accident. This is around the same time we had made it into Spain and was experiencing lots of thunder storms and rain. Due to the weather, we were zigzagging through the mountains navigating to different stops we had decided on that day. Sometimes we would be on a smooth motorway that snaked around the foot of the mountains, and other times we would have no choice but to take a small windy road that wound up and down the steep cliffs. The first of our heart wrenching experiences came when we had left a beautiful spot in Arija. We had been wild camping next to a lake in the mountains that I found the previous drive there to be quite enjoyable. We enjoyed a peaceful two days then left, hoping the drive to the North coast would be similar, but it was far from it. It wasn't long until the road became thinner and we were fighting our way uphill, taking in the glorious smel...