Tag: cornwall

fromrusttoroadtrip:

When we set off on our second roadtrip we didn’t make it easy for ourselves. We didn’t deliberately set ourselves some kind of challenge, depriving ourselves of heat, comfort and commodities- we just got a little overexcited when packing for our trip, and kind of forgot everything we needed.⁣⁣

Despite having already spent winter in the Alps, and without heeding the warnings of how severe the Balkan weather could get, we packed only a summer duvet, two blankets, left behind our fleeces and coats and winter boots. And within a week of leaving we were treated to our first sub-zero night in Austria, when snowflakes fell into the night turning the valley around us from green at dusk to white at dawn.⁣⁣

We faced many a cold, shivering night over the 7 months we were on the road, and with the short-sighted naivety of two young excitable travellers who thought that the summer heat and roadtrips would be endless, we neglected to put more than a bare covering of insulation in our van when we built it. This, coupled with our broken hot water tank, lack of leisure battery power and broken dashboard heater, all of which broke within the first week of our trip, made for a distinct lack of comfort.⁣⁣

And you know what? We pulled through. We survived. We took long drives to charge our laptops. We huddled close together at night for heat. We scraped the ice from inside our windows in the mornings, drank endless hot chocolates, and enjoyed the swirl of powder white falling around us. ⁣⁣You see we didn’t choose discomfort, we didn’t choose the cold; we didn’t choose unpreparedness but it set us up for a challenge. And the thing about challenges is they’re not always enjoyable, they’re not always fun, but they’re not supposed to be. They don’t provide short term enjoyment and distractions from life; they force you to face it head on, and give you a deeper sense of satisfaction and strength.⁣⁣

A life without challenge is unfulfilling, even when the nights may be cold and the days are often hard, but success is addictive, and almost immediately after one challenge ended, we began looking for another…⁣⁣

Follow the hashtag #Fromrusttoroadtrip to follow our van conversion project and our travels around Europe! 🌍 

fromrusttoroadtrip:

When we embarked on our very first adventure, bright-eyed, eager, knowing very little of the world we live in, we were given good luck talismans by our friends and family. We were gifted a chunk of topaz, a necklace and two bracelets, one green one black, one with the sign for peace and the other with the tree of life, and a piece of paper with instructions to tie them around our wrists and make a wish and when the bracelets broke our wishes would come true.

We made our wishes and adorned ourselves in these talismans thinking little of them at the time.

Two months into our first trip our van broke down. We were off the road for a week, angry and bitter at being separated from our home, and we cursed our luck and we cursed fate and chance and karma too.

A little while later, when we were back on the road but with a big hole in our savings, Ben was examining his wrist.

“My bracelet snapped,” he said, confused at the correlation between our recent terrible luck and the wish the bracelet had promised to grant us.

“Well that didn’t work,” I’d said scornfully.

“No… Maybe it did. Maybe that’s the reason I touched the brake pedal before we set off down that mountain road. Maybe it actually saved our lives.”

We sat in silence for a while, thinking loud thoughts.

“What did you wish for?” I whispered finally.

“Safe travels.”

“So did I.”


Follow the hashtag #Fromrusttoroadtrip to follow our van conversion project and our travels around Europe! 🌍