Van Life

Van Life: A Mirror on the Road

There comes a time when the place you’ve always known no longer feels like home. The streets change. The people change. And one day, you realize you’ve changed too.

That’s how it was for me in the late ’90s. The fields I’d played in as a boy were long gone, swallowed by housing estates and a restless energy that didn’t suit me. Working nights didn’t help—it left me out of sync with the world, like a ghost drifting through my own life. I needed space. Quiet. Somewhere to exhale.

So I bought a van

Not a glossy, Instagram-ready camper, but a battered old ambulance with rust creeping along its seams. It smelled of antiseptic and diesel, a relic of other people’s emergencies. My friends thought I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. But when I parked it on a backroad that first night, miles from the nearest village, and switched off the engine, the silence was so complete it hummed in my ears. I slept deeper than I had in years.

Lessons in Letting Go

Van life has a way of stripping things down—not just possessions, but illusions. You quickly learn what matters: a warm bed, a dry roof, enough gas to boil a kettle. Everything else is negotiable.

I remember lying beneath the van one winter, blasting a hairdryer at frozen pipes, my breath clouding in the cold. It should have felt like misery. Instead, there was a strange satisfaction in solving the problem myself, in needing so little and making it work.

I’d rigged up solar panels and an induction hob by then, though I rarely used them. Old habits die hard. We cling to comforts even when we don’t need them, as if they’re proof we haven’t entirely slipped society’s leash.

The Unseen People of the Road

You notice things when you live on the margins. The families in cars that pull into beauty spots just long enough for a photo, then speed away. The truck drivers who nod as they pass your van, acknowledging a fellow traveler. The others like you—some by choice, some by necessity—whose stories you’ll never know.

Once, parked on an industrial estate, I woke to a policeman’s torch in my window. There’d been a break-in nearby. He checked my van, took my name, and left. No suspicion, just a quiet understanding. People fear what they don’t know, but sometimes, all it takes is a face-to-face moment to dissolve the tension.

Why We Leave

Van life isn’t about running away. It’s about running toward something—a slower pace, a different rhythm, a life where the clock matters less than the sky. You start to see the absurdity in routines built for someone else’s convenience. Why rush? Why accumulate? Why pretend we need so much?

There’s a sticker you see on vans sometimes: “One life… live it.” It’s easy to roll your eyes. But after years on the road, I think I understand. It’s not about grand adventures (though there are plenty). It’s about waking up to your own choices.

The Road Back

I don’t live in a van anymore. But I still carry the lessons: how little we truly need, how much we overcomplicate, how freedom isn’t a place but a way of moving through the world.

Maybe that’s the real gift of van life. It doesn’t just change where you sleep—it changes how you see. And once you’ve seen the world that way, you can’t quite unsee it.