Life on the Road

Story and photography by Tim Wilson.
IG: @timhasfun Website: tim-wilson.co.uk

“What’s it like, living in a van?”
I get asked this question a lot, and there’s no simple answer. Every day is very different to the next. Where I sleep, who I meet, and the gaps of time between the fixed milestones of mealtimes and bedtimes are all open to much more variety than when I lived in a house.
My routine is still there but some things now take considerably longer to achieve, whereas others are easier. There is a perceived glamour to having a home on wheels – a more liberated lifestyle; closer to nature; free to come and go as you please. To an extent this is true; I feel very fortunate to say that I can spend much more of my time in naturally beautiful spaces, as I’ve never been one for cities or crowds.

One of my favourite times is just after breakfast; most days I’ll sit on our sofa at the open side-door, having coffee and looking out at wherever we are that day. If we have been parked up all night in a quiet rural spot, the local wildlife is usually used to the van by the morning. I will regularly see woodpeckers, jays and robins foraging quite close to us as we sit in the doorway.
My girlfriend Willow and I converted our van entirely on our own. Near the end of 2020, in between lockdowns, we moved into the van full-time. I am very proud of what we’ve achieved and the fact that it’s our little space together. I would not trade this for anything. A lot of work went into making it happen and the same goes for keeping it that way.

Making the move into a van during winter meant we faced a lot of the challenges straight away. Our first month coincided with the heaviest snowfall in the area for several years. Within this month our heater broke, a dodgy earth point caused the rest of the electrics to play up constantly; and we got grounded twice due to sheet ice and snowdrifts. This was a new way of life for us, and we had to simply embrace the pitfalls and adapt. Until I fixed the heater, that first month was very cold. We didn’t sleep well as a result, but every day of sunshine was a blessing, and I was happy to have enough gas in the stove to keep the kettle on.

Improvisation becomes an essential skill. The day we got stranded on ice, we used our slackline as a towrope, and now that the weather is warmer, we often use it as a washing line.
Our world now is a constant negotiation with space – while we are often too big for a lot of parking spaces, with two people inside it sometimes feels like the van is not big enough. Whenever I feel like this, I remind myself why I chose to live this way and open the side-door – and suddenly the world is my garden, and it goes on for ever.