People regularly ask “What made you decide to become nomads?”. The short answer is that we gave it a go and decided we liked it, but here is a slightly longer answer, which might be of interest to others, particularly if you’re thinking of making the break to living and working without a permanent base.
It all started in the summer of 2020. Our home is in the UK, but I’m travelling to work in Brussels one week in three. We’re considering moving to Belgium, but the Covid19 pandemic is obviously making things very uncertain.
To keep our options open, Lizzie and I decide to move full-time into a motorhome to provide a flexible home in both countries.
That simple decision seemed a sensible, pragmatic step, but it turned out to be far more of a life-changing experience than we imagined at the time.
A year later we’d sold our house and were revelling in the freedom of living day-to-day without a permanent home as ‘professional nomads’. As I write this (five and a half years of ‘van-life’ later), we’ve just sold the motorhome too and thrown ourselves into an even more nomadic lifestyle, in particular house/pet sitting – a perfect way to travel lightly and cheaply (while helping our hosts to holiday with peace of mind, win-win).
How It All Began
The impetus for our initial move was the Covid19 pandemic. We were fortunate not to have any serious ill effects in our family, but there were a number of ways Covid affected us. Not least creating the desire to embrace life more, having lived through a risky period of history. The key impact though was more mundane.
In order to manage the Covid19 pandemic, my Belgian employers were operating a schedule of working two weeks from home and then one week in the office, in Brussels.
Working from home was fine, but the Covid travel restrictions meant that as soon as I got back to the UK from my Belgian office week, I had to stay isolated for the two weeks. Then, return for a week, isolate for a fortnight, on repeat.
It was not a long term solution, obviously, and, of course, there was some expectation/hope that things would get back to ‘normal’ eventually, so we started looking at how to relocate to Brussels.
At that time, we also had business venues in Cheltenham, Stourbridge and Kidderminster temporarily closed by Covid, so the ability to stay in those places periodically, to shore up those businesses, was also important.
In the end we hit on the idea of living in a motorhome. A flexible home that we could use in either Belgium or around the UK, as needed.
Buying Our First Motorhome
In the summer of 2020, following a couple of lockdowns and restrictions on foreign travel, there was a huge surge of people in the UK also looking at buying motorhome and campervans. Prices were highly inflated and there was a wide range of fairly ropey vans on the market.
As the whole adventure was an experiment, we wanted to try it out without spending too much, so we decided to go for a bigger secondhand van rather than a newer smaller van. As we were planning to live full-time in the van, we wanted a decent bed and plenty of space. Not some little camper more suitable for weekend trips out. We did a fair amount of research online and visited various dealerships around the country. We’d never owned a motorhome before, so we wanted to get it right.
We settled on a 16-yr old Burstner Elegance i821. As you’d guess, the i821 is 8.21m long. A twin-axle beast with a permanent fixed bed at the rear, above a large garage/storage area, which was equally useful, particularly for storing our bicycles. Burstner have a good reputation for making solid, reliable motorhomes, and even a van of that age was still in pretty good condition (much better than some of the newer vans we looked at).
It proved a good buy for us. Inevitably, we did need to do some work on it later (rebuilding the gearbox for one), but it served us well for about five years and still sold at a decent price.
We bought the motorhome at the end of the 2020 summer. It was a private sale, via a motorhome specialist broker, which provided a little extra safety and a six month warranty, but still cheaper than a big dealer. Being our first motorhome, we felt that was a useful halfway house.
Saying Goodbye To Cheltenham
After buying the motorhome we took a bit of holiday to test it out. Stopping off at a campsite near one of our closed venues in Kidderminster (so I could check on that at the same time). It was useful to get an idea of everything we needed and anything we might have forgotten. After that, we drove down to our family home in Cheltenham to pack everything we would need into it for the foreseeable future.
We had lived in our Cheltenham house for over fifteen years at that point, and had accumulated plenty of stuff over the years. Fortunately, two of our (grownup) children decided to rent the house, so we were able to leave a lot of the contents in situ. We just needed to pack what we needed for the motorhome and then store away anything we didn’t need. Of course, at the time, we were viewing this as a temporary experience and fully expected to move back into the house at some point in the future (maybe a year or two).
Despite it seeming only a ‘temporary’ absence, it did feel very freeing to leave our accumulated junk behind and head off in the motorhome with just the basics. I guess that feeling didn’t leave us, as, less than a year later we had sold the house and cleared out the remainder of our junk too. (We also helped our children/tenants to buy new houses, so they weren’t out on the street, in case anyone was worried).
After packing the motorhome that first time, there was still the necessity of my day job, so, leaving Lizzie to one final week at our Cheltenham home, I headed off to Brussels once more.
The First Week Of Campsite Living
My first venture into motorhome life then was certainly fully immersed. I returned from Belgium and went straight to spending a fortnight in isolation inside the motorhome, on the campsite where we had pre-parked it.
It was a fun experience even so, which is reflected in my video diary of that time. Having spent a lot of the previous year confined to living in our house under Covid lockdowns, living in the far smaller space of the motorhome was somehow less confined. It helped that the weather was exceptionally good for early October.
It was a good opportunity to establish our working arrangements. The wifi was just about ok, but we did struggle sometimes with video calls (but in 2020, video call disruption was something everyone was working out, even working from ‘brick’ homes). More specific to us, Lizzie and I had to resolve how to having those video call conversations with others while not disturbing each other in such a confined space. It did take a bit of working out!
The campsite was pretty deserted. Covid distancing restrictions were still in place, so we rarely saw anyone else (and I was isolating anyway). We were both working long hours at the time, but being on a campsite, it felt more like being on holiday even so, and the lack of bustle was very relaxing when we had free time.
Motorhome Living To Date
I think I never quite lost that feeling of being partly on holiday all the time we lived in a motorhome. Maybe it simply evoked memories of childhood camping holidays, but there is also something very distinctly pleasant about campsite life. Having stayed on numerous campsites since, of various shapes and sizes, it’s rare to see anyone who won’t give you a cheery greeting, or even pass the time of day. I guess most people are on holiday, so are mostly relaxed and enjoying themselves anyway, but I do think the simple campsite life, basic amenities, fresh air et al, is good for the soul.
We also realised very quickly that the feeling of being free to go where you want at anytime was something we valued far more than needing a permanent house to live in. It wasn’t that we actually wanted to be constantly moving. The Covid restrictions and, subsequently, our business needs meant we actually stayed in the same place for many months at a time, but we still knew that we could just pack up and move on anytime. It was an easy decision, for us, to choose to continue to carry on nomading.
As it turned out, we never actually made it to Belgium in the motorhome in 2020. Within a month of buying the motorhome, my department was axed (in a bid to reduce the impact of Covid), and I finished working in Brussels at the end of December 2020. By then, though, we were hooked on being ‘professional nomads’, and were so glad to have made the switch, we couldn’t be upset about losing the Belgium contract.
We really loved living in the motorhome and would definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to live ‘on the road’. However, in recent years, we realised that it could also be a bit of a bind. We love being nomads, and the motorhome enabled that really well, but it could be restrictive too, especially being such a big motorhome not easily parked up or good for small country lanes. We may buy another one again some day, but currently we’re enjoying the freedom of not even having a home on wheels, never mind a brick home, as a permanent base. That’s not for everybody, but it’s working for us.
