My 3 weeks of #vanlife with (almost) no access to the internet
What grand insights did I bring back from my spiritual voyage into the wilds of France and Spain to delight and enrage you soulless bunch of corporate drones? 😉
Well, before we slide into life-affirming clickbait territory, I must first say that it was, more than anything, just a bloody lovely holiday and a fun little adventure, a third of the time just me and Biscuit (the dog), but 2 wonderful weeks with Ellie (my partner) too.
The thing I’d love to hold on to, the biggest realisation, perhaps the biggest surprise, was that I didn’t miss any of it.
By ‘it’ I mean this distracted, reactive, relentless reality that we’ve grown to accept as the way things are over the last 10 years. A period of time (almost) without the internet or a phone is just really fucking great and I recommend that you try it out at the next available opportunity.
I didn’t miss any of it…
I didn’t miss the weight of my phone in my right-hand pocket; the temptation to check for notifications hundreds of times a day; the conversations on WhatsApp and Messenger that stretch out over days and weeks; scrolling through other people’s lives on Instagram and (increasingly rarely nowadays) Facebook; reading the news and checking the weather when there’s not much else to do; feeling useful and needed by clients and collaborators; sending and chasing invoices or forecasting finances; feeling like I’m connected to everything and everyone; Googling something the instant a question pops into my head; taking hundreds of photos that I’ll almost never look at again.
I knew it was all still going on in the background, but I quite frankly didn’t give a shit.
So what did we do?
We sat in our van and we drove 3,500 miles through England, France, and Spain.
We listened to local radio and to music that’s been hanging around on Ellie’s iPod for a while. Stuff that I still have on some hard drive somewhere. Vampire Weekend and The Beatles and Fela Kuti and The Cat Empire and John Martyn and Nat King Cole and Joni Mitchell and Amadou & Mariam.
We read. And I read a lot, especially when I was alone. More than I have in perhaps a decade. I rekindled that obsessive need to find out what happens next that I had as a kid. I read The Dice Man and Adjustment Day and The Good Immigrant and Americanah and Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist and started Things Fall Apart. Some of these novels shook me pretty deeply and I hope I’m changed as a result of reading them. We’ll see.
We used real maps to find places to go and figure out how to get there. Sometimes writing directions on a scrap of paper that we kept on the dashboard, sometimes stopping if a place looked interesting or if there was a market on or if we were tired or if we just happened to feel like it.
We spent the mornings looking for croissants and coffee. The afternoons looking for lunch. The evenings looking for somewhere to sleep.
Over 21 days we only spent 4 nights in paid campsites, which left 17 nights of wild camper-vanning. We slept in a pine forest that bordered the Atlantic Ocean. We slept in a slightly dodgy cemetery carpark. We slept in rest stops and off-season beach towns and on dirt tracks.
We searched for places to walk with our dog and places for us to run off all the croissants we’d eaten (5 pastries for €3!).
We found places to wash because we didn’t want to smell like we’d spent 3 weeks sleeping in a van, even if we had. And we ended up washing in the ocean, in lakes, in beachside public showers, and in cold mountain streams.
We drank cider in País Vasco, ate moules-frites in Brittany, had pintxos in San Sebastián, devoured soft tortilla de patatas for breakfast in Cantabria, snarfed translucent slices of jamón in Extremadura, and every day in France we had unbelievably deliciously buttery viennoiseries.
We filled our days with adventure and games and love and challenge and fun. Almost none of it documented or shared or planned. It was a holiday just how they used to be, back when I was a kid travelling through France in an old camper or caravan or tent with my parents and two brothers.
It was time to think and think and think and mull things over and feel happy and sad and nostalgic and afraid and alive and pathetic and present.
It was just what I needed after an interesting and busy and digitally connected 6 years.
But you must have used your phone?
I did, dear reader, use my phone a couple of times:
- To check that Ellie was still flying out to Bordeaux at the time she said she would.
- To navigate to a specific location that a hitchhiker we picked up had requested.
- To look up the rules of 2 dice games.
- To find 2 vets for Biscuit, once when he was (we later found out) very ill with a tick-borne blood parasite, and again when he needed a tapeworm pill before returning to the UK (a legal requirement).
- To let Jon know that we wouldn’t make it down to Portugal to see him and his family in their new home because our dog was really ill.
- To find a campsite when our dog was really ill.
- To book a return trip on the Eurotunnel.
- To send our accountant something important after an emergency message to Ellie from Jon.
- To top up my Monzo card when I knew I’d spent more than anticipated.
- To take 1 photo of my sleeping little family.
So more than a few times, but only when necessary and only for a total of about 20 minutes over 21 days, which I’m pretty happy with.
I say that. It still feels like a lot when I write it out! Imagine documenting all of the times you look at your phone or laptop on a normal day. The list would be insane and terrifying.
So if you can…
Find some time to not be on the internet. As long as you can. We’ve grown so used to this constant connection. To all of the people and answers at our fingertips all the time. I think it’s amazing and beautiful and terrifying and I’d hate to live without it, but this trip was a timely reminder that there was a time before all this stuff, and it was pretty good too.
If you’re interested in money, here it is
I’ve written before about financial transparency and how I think it’s silly that people don’t share more, so I thought I’d share the costs of the trip in case that’s useful or interesting.
Ellie pointed out the irony of writing and publishing this. How, after a trip that was so glorious in its lack of connection to the internet and social media, I still couldn’t quite bring myself to let it exist only in that realm. I still had to share what I did with the world.
She’s totally right. It’s deeply embedded now, the desire to show-off and share that these apps and corporations have instilled in us.
My hope, though, is that this little write-up encourages you to get the fuck off the internet for a while 😵
