All posts tagged: travelling life

Vanlife remembered

We’ve been home now for over a month. I say ‘home’ but for us as a family right now, this is a vague concept that seems to merely mean not living in a van that moves every few days. At the moment this place of non-moving is my dad’s house, the house that I grew up in. Our presence here is signified by the noise and mountains of life-crud now crammed into his formerly quiet and ordered, if a little eccentric, single pensioner’s life. My dad has lived in this place since before I was born and has never (to my knowledge) had any plans to go anywhere else. While I have moved my children about almost constantly over the last couple of years, my own childhood home has barely changed. Rob finds it bemusing that we are now taking baths in the very same bathtub I sat in as a teenager; watching our feet resting on the same taps that I rested my feet upon some twenty years ago. I have found it strangely …

On Homesickness

It comes in waves. Today is a bad day. We are seven months or so into our travelling adventure and I’m aware that each bad spell feels a little harder; each new start after visitors have left takes a little more energy. Poring over maps feels daunting rather than uplifting on days like these. We’re in Istria still and have been here for around three weeks. After Rob’s parents left us near Trieste we had a couple of weeks to kill before our friends, the Parry family, were due to visit. Hanging around without a clear plan, with very little money for fun or luxury camping, kills momentum. We struggled, or rather I, struggled. The many frustrations of living a life within a few square metres were getting to me, along with grumpy children and nowhere to escape to. On a bad day the list goes on and on. Then our friends arrived and we spent a blissful week of children playing together, swimming in crystal waters, eating out and drinking too much. All was …