Of time and the road.

Or. How to live longer in the same number of years.

Think of this as a bonus track on an album. Content that doesn’t fit with the whole, but the singer/writer, or me in this instance, wanted to share.

It has been a week of running around getting jobs done and visiting. It wouldn’t make good reading, so instead today we bring you thoughts on VanLife’s affect on our time.

Time. 

Our most precious resource.

As a child such a suggestion is ridiculous. Time is torture, probably until your late teens. 

Speak to someone in their later years and it’s as if they’ve slipped into another dimension. No conversation with mother is without her exclaiming how fast her time is passing.

For us on the road it has lost its impact.

What a wonderful thing.

Yes we still function with the same clock, the same calendar.

Yes we had to be back in the UK for ArchieVan’s MoT.

Yet on a more immediate scale time seems to matter only on Saturday morning when the blog is due.

How?

It has a lot to do with packing life into the space we have.

When I go to bed I deliberately run through the day gone by to consider the things I have seen, what I have learned, where we have been. 

I start with considering where we woke that morning.

When you wake in the same bed in the same room every day that matters not.

But when you wake in the same bed but in a different place most days it is an incredible thing to consider what has happened during your day.

When I lie down at night and think back to where I rose 14 or so hours earlier I sometimes have to think hard to remember where that place was. 

The intervening hours in Greece may have seen us visit the remains of a civilisation that existed two and a half thousand years ago. 

We may have started the day on a beach, then driven over a mountain range where the scenery changed by the minute. 

At the time you don’t truly absorb what you’re seeing as you’re concentrating intently on keeping the van on the road. Hopefully we’ll have taken photos to help jog our memory.

We will have stopped for a bit to eat and spoken to people who have lived lives utterly different to ours.

Almost certainly we will have passed goatherds pocessed of wisdom that our lives will never gather.

I swim in the sea, we walk the hills. We visit towns where everything is exciting and new to us. We comment on the differences, in roads, driving style, streets, houses, dogs, the importance of style and elegance (Italy), the lack of both (Greece).

Most important, I’ll sometimes comment on that place where we woke, and Minty will almost inevitably ask “Was that only today?”

The waking hours of a single day can often seem like the activity of a whole week.

If a day can seem like a week, then in a month we may cram half a year.

It feels as if we are achieving immense value from our lives right now.

The hours of the clock march on regardless, but our own concept of that march has slowed considerably – I believe we have received a special gift.

Perhaps eventually we’ll grow accustomed to the amount of change and it will become a new normal. 

We are a year into the journey though, and it hasn’t happened yet. 

A year? Are you sure is hasn’t been ten?

VanLife. What has changed on ArchieVan?

ArchieVan has had some (expensive but worthwhile) changes.

Two new roof lights, one with a built in fan.

Another solar panel, now giving us 280W – we shouldn’t run low any more.

And a few other fixes at Cornwall Van Conversions.

I’m about to meet Andi to collect a new foot rest come boot store which I’ll share a photo of next time.

Here in the cold English spring provisions for the heat seem expensive and of questionable value – but when the temperatures start to soar again in Central Europe I expect we’ll be very pleased with what we’ve done.

What’s next?

Three more weeks and we’ll be back on the road.

I’ll pause the blog in the meantime and look forward to being back in touch with everyone later this month.

We had the good fortune to stay for a week at our friend’s rather special home in Sennen called Mill House. It can be booked through The Cornish Way.