Specialist vs standard cover, full-timing, what breakdown recovery really pays (a real Andalusian breakdown), the GHIC, the 90/180 rule and a nomad's ...
Breakdowns are the worst thing that can happen during your road trip, so in this article, we give you all the tips to make this moment easier to accep...
Breakdowns are the worst thing that can happen during your road trip, so in this article, we give you all the tips to make this moment easier to accep...
Living in a van full time is less about sunsets and more about the small logistics that fill a day, and that is exactly what this corner of the blog covers. We split our year between an apartment base in Portugal’s Algarve and long stretches touring Europe, so we have washed dishes with three litres of water and shivered through a February that made us question everything. If you are weighing up the whole lifestyle first, our honest list of mistakes when starting vanlife is the piece we wish someone had handed us before we bought a single thing.
Hygiene is the question everyone asks and nobody quite believes the answer to. We wrote up exactly how we manage showering and washing in a campervan without a permanent bathroom, from solar bags to the odd well timed swimming pool. Temperature is the other daily battle, and it cuts both ways: our guide to beating the heat in vanlife pairs with the cold weather playbook, because an Algarve August and a mountain December ask completely opposite things of you.
Cold season is where a lot of new vanlifers quietly give up, so we have two pieces on it. One follows our habit of escaping to the sun for winter, chasing Andalusia and Morocco while the north freezes, and the other is a proper technical breakdown of how to live in a motorhome through winter when staying put is the plan. Condensation, heating, and staying sane all get honest treatment here.
Nobody tells you what upkeep really costs, so we laid out the true cost of maintaining a converted vehicle down to the annoying small stuff. Living small also reshapes your relationship with things, which is why our take on vanlife and minimalism is more lived than preachy. Then there is the cat, who did not sign up for any of this yet somehow rules the van, and travelling vanlife with a pet deserved its own honest write up. Keeping some kind of routine matters too, so we shared how we handle fitness and training on a road trip without a gym in sight.
The boring grown up questions matter more than the Instagram ones. We dug into whether it is even legal to live in a van across different countries, and paired it with everything we do for safety in vanlife after a couple of uneasy nights taught us to read a spot properly. Finding a bed is a nightly puzzle, and our guide to where to sleep on a road trip saves real stress. On the practical admin side, sorting vanlife insurance in the UK is one of those things you only appreciate once it goes wrong.
How you drive changes both your budget and your nerves, so we shared what we learned about driving efficiently in a motorhome across mountain passes and motorway slogs. Not every plan survives the road either, and one memorable time a breakdown turned into a road trip we would not trade back. Underpinning all of it is the phone, and these are genuinely the campervan apps we really keep rather than a padded list nobody uses.