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Living in my van: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Let me clarify. It had absolutely nothing to do with the van itself, which I had, of course, constructed to perfection. As previously explained, I had planned, and pinterested, and listed my way to my dream van for well over a year beforehand, and for those eight months I was actually living in it, I added only a handful of annoyances to my “fix list”. No, what made it the worst was something that I couldn’t plan for. Life happened.
In December 2016, about two months over deadline but on bang on budget, I set off from the driveway of my still flabbergasted and slightly bemused parents, nervously maneuvering my behemoth around their herbaceous borders, and took the ferry to the continent. I spent my first ever night in Bobby in a random train station car park in Belgium. But the views improved slightly as I travelled around northern Italy – seeing the snowy alps for the first time – then down to sunny Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain, oh my. I met so many wonderful, like-minded people, and climbed some amazing routes with these fellow van-dwelling weirdos.
But during this time I was constantly feeling torn. Because you see, just before I set off in my van, I met a man. He was amazing; gorgeous, funny, interesting, sensitive, a climber. And we were instantly in love in a way I’d never, ever felt before. But he lived in Munich, and had a stable, good job and an apartment with a mortgage. And he couldn’t leave either for an indefinite amount of time to travel with me, although we managed a few rendezvous along the way.
And so, the worst of times began. First there were the many teary phone calls from my van, pulled between wanting to be with this man in Munich, but also wanting to live out my dream that I had worked so hard to make a reality. I didn’t ever want to feel resentful that my time in my van was cut short, especially not “for a boy,” and one who – as I saw it – I planned on spending the rest of my life with. And lest we forget, I didn’t stay on the road out of some sense of stubbornness or principle, I was actually enjoying myself.
But they just kept on coming. That wonderful, sensitive boyfriend? He basically gave me an ultimatum, declaring he “couldn’t wait” for me any longer. At the time, I thought it was romantic. I know now that it was not. So I moved to Munich, sooner than planned, where Bobby was banished beyond the city walls, because of his lack of a little green Umweltzone sticker, where he languished for almost a year. That same boyfriend began chipping away at my love for Bobby with his criticisms and refusal to take the van for weekends away in the mountains – so temptingly close to our home in Munich, but so rarely visited – because the bed was too small, and I snored too much, I/Bobby didn’t drive fast enough and, and, and … I thought it was the engineer in him. I know now that it was not.
With my name now on the doorbell in an apartment in Munich, and my address no longer “the open road”, I decided to sell my van, so that we could convert a new, smaller one. Together.
July 2018. Off I went back to England, to do some much-needed, well-paid summer work and to sell Bobby.
That boyfriend, who I was living with, and talking about starting a family? He dumped me over the phone, on my lunch break, on the first day of the job.
Dear Reader, we have not yet reached the worst of times.
“You could live in your van,” some helpfully suggested, when they heard what had happened, through my frequent tears. And it was true. The break-up presented an opportunity to redo the van life, the climbing-bum dream, and do it properly; not tied down by a long-distance partner. But I didn’t really have the desire (or maybe, the drive) to do that anymore. However hard I had found parking up my van and hanging up my climbing shoes on a balcony instead of on the rearview mirror of my camper, I had eventually found my place in Munich and settled down. During the course of this relationship I found that my dreams and goals were evolving. There was still that drive to travel and adventure, but my feet were no longer so itchy. I wanted what I had lost, or what I thought I had lost: a home, stability, a partnership.
Well, that was what I told myself. There was also a huge part of not wanting to be in a van that was so closely tied to some of my happiest – and let’s be honest – unhappiest moments from the relationship.
But I had to do something, as time was ticking on my seven week, fixed-term contract. I decided I would go back to Munich. To the social opportunities, the culture, the good looking men, the proximity to the mountains and all the adventure opportunities they allow, not to mention the huge amount of time I had invested learning German … Sure he was there. But I also knew where he lived and I knew his schedule. It would be perfectly possible to live there and never see him again. He could be avoided.
And so I once again set off on a ferry bound for Europe, but this time with none of the excitement and eagerness I had felt before. I wasn’t driving to meet my love. I wasn’t driving off to find adventures. I was literally on auto-pilot, just driving to survive, whilst telling myself, “Just get through x, y, and z, and everything will be OK.” X being “find a job”, y being “find a place to live”, z being “taking care of my basic human needs well enough to stay alive”; things like eating, sleeping, and drinking.
Looking back, it was never going to end well. I was sleeping in my van in a carpark, timing my toilet trips to convenient times (or using a receptacle at inconvenient times), pretending to potential employers that I was sleeping on a friend’s sofa, and spending every waking moment running up the giant mountain that is finding an apartment in Munich. All the time in a city where everywhere and everything reminded me of him.
And Bobby? Bobby was not designed and built to be in a city. He’s a countryside van, made for mountains and lakes. He’s made to snuggle down in after long days at the crag, not try and recover from long days in an office. Of course, he was warm and cosy when I was parked up on the streets of Munich. But he couldn’t keep out the noise of the roads, or the wobble I would feel when a car would whizz by too fast.
I would set my alarm for seven or eight o’clock, to try and get up and establish a routine. I would make myself a cup of tea on my stove, and also a flask to save money on cups of tea later. Then I would head to a nearby museum as early as possible, and sit there using the unlimited wi-fi with at least ten windows open on my internet browser. Four different house-hunting websites, three windows devoted to job advert websites, and whichever job application I was working on in between refreshing the other tabs. And of course, Google translate, because I was doing all this in German. When I needed a shower, I went to the climbing wall, climbed, and showered. But never on the days or times he might be there. I never needed to eat and was existing mostly on tortilla wraps with sliced bananas, chocolate, and packets of pre-seasoned couscous or lentils.
The official worst-of-the-worst times would have to be ending up on a psychiatric ward in Germany for three months, to recover from the – quite frankly, in hindsight – totally inevitable nervous breakdown.
***
I got better.
Literally the first thing I did when I was discharged from the hospital in December 2018 – and I mean the very next day – was to drive Bobby 500 km to France to spend a week learning how to ski. In that week, it would seem like I was cured. It felt so right driving Bobby down the snow-lined toll roads of Switzerland, climbing higher and higher, dropping down a gear, and then another gear. But that week was an exception. Not every week could be like that, especially as I still didn’t have a job nor any friends in this totally new but also same old city.
In the ups and downs of recovery that were to come – those weeks and months of building a life, essentially from scratch – I could never manage to untangle Bobby from the past, and thus I could not slot him into my imagined future.
Of course, I remembered how happy I had been, travelling around; but that also came with a sharp stab of hindsight, as I thought how naive I had been. I felt stupid for letting myself be so in love, and then so hurt. It was impossible to look back on memories without seeing them through a lens of what came later. Why had I thought I was happy? Why had I thought this was a good relationship? Why had I ignored so many red flags?
And I remembered how ill I had been. Bobby’s distinctive woody fixtures and alcohol fuel smell still reminded me of the nausea I felt from my depression, every time I tried to eat. I remembered how deeply unhappy I was. And I don’t use this term lightly, how traumatic that whole experience was.
I made up my mind. It was time to sell Bobby.
To be concluded…
