You can’t always get it right and we certainly haven’t, a lot of travelling is trial and error and learning from your mistakes. Sometimes, no matter how much research you do, you’re going to miss something, that’s even more frustrating when social media taunts you with stunning photos of places you have long missed. Or totally mis judging the width of the road and the width of the van leading to a scrape down one side of our little home. Wasn’t me. Here I’ll share with you some of our van life fails.
Changing or not changing a tyre
When in New Zealand we bought our converted seven seater car we dubbed Gladys from a small dealership primarily specialising is second hand camper vans. Being our first trip away we were novices and blindly trusted that we had everything we needed. It wasn’t until we were on Arthurs Pass – translation – in the middle of nowhere – that we got a flat tyre. No problem we have a spare, that is something we thought to check. Oh but there’s no jack – sigh. No phone service, miles to the main road and even more miles to the nearest town and no one around. All we could was wait until someone came by and luckily they did. Sadly their jack wouldn’t work on Gladys as it was a bottle jack, but they did kindly drive Will to the main road to get cell service. Later down the line we needed to replace the spare tyre and ended up getting a tyre older than the car its self – double sigh. We didn’t even know that car tyres had a date on them! Many lessons learnt.
Illegal immigrants on bikes
One sunny day whilst lounging by the Danube river in Serbia, Will and a friend who had been travelling along with us in their Campervan decided that beer would be just the thing. Hopping on their bikes, off they went to the nearest shop. As it turns out, on their bike ride using a shortcut, they somehow stumbled into the Serbian border control who believed the two bike riders had crossed the river illegally from Romania. There was much confusion on both sides as they were pulled from pillar to post, luckily our friend had their passport on them and Will had his driving licence on him, otherwise who knows what would have happened! Doing the best they could both Will and our friend tried explaining that it was all a misunderstanding. After some time the Serbians got the gist and let them go. A narrow escape.
Outlaws abroad
We have had two fines whilst on the road and hope that’s all it will ever be. It was only on our second day in Bulgaria that we realised we needed to pay road tax, thinking we had made a lucky escape we quickly paid the tax online and went about our day. To our surprise we were later pulled over and handed two €70 fines from our first day, as it turned out we got picked up on camera. Well, what a welcome.
Or second fine was in Argentina. It is a legal requirement to have your car lights on whenever you are driving. Now, we did know this and we were abiding to this. Only it takes a little getting use to. We had pulled over just to make a cup of tea and had previously been driving with lights on but as we pulled off after our little break admittedly we did forget. Just a few hundred yards from where we stopped we got pulled over and fined the equivalent of €180. Jeeeeeez. We now have stickers around the dashboard as reminders.
Some more van life fails
There will be more to come from our travels but before that here are a few honourable mentions:
Having only had our solar shower for a matter of months we have broken the shower head not once but twice beyond repair. Now we have a garden spray attachment fitted to it.
Not sure if it counts as a fail if it works, but we repaired our ancient kettle with a piece of spare wood.
Again our very new gas cooker, even newer that the shower, broke! Basically the gas valve got blocked and then seized to work, so we had to get a new valve which was bigger than the last, so instead of having the original control knob, we ‘fixed’ it with a guitar pic instead. It’s aways handy living with a musician. If it works, it works!
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