“Van Life is a sub-culture of nomadic individuals who are embracing minimalism on a journey to reassess what is truly important for a happy and balanced life.” – Ben, Kombi Life As more people fall in love with the idea of freedom, minimalism and moving away from traditional 9-5 living, van life is becoming more popular than ever. You can barely move for all the #vanlife Instagram accounts out there and we’ve certainly met a huge number of van lifers during our time on the road. But while it all seems like a nice idea, the reality is that it’s not for everyone – and that’s OK! For us, the…
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Three months in: An update on van life
I’ve picked up a lot of extra work recently and taken on some great new clients, which means I have been writing my butt off the past couple of months. Just sadly not for this blog. And I do feel a genuine sadness when I haven’t had time to stop and write something for myself. I am always writing for other people, but as I get paid to do so it really does have to take priority in my brain. So today I decide to take a quick 10 minutes for myself to share an update on what we’ve been up to since we left Scotland. Especially as yesterday officially…
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Freelance writing on the road – what it’s like becoming a digital nomad
In the months leading up to leaving I had read so much about how people had transformed their lives by becoming freelance writers and the best ways to go about it. I read a lot. I learnt a lot. But there’s one big difference between what I was reading and what I am doing, and that is that most of the people I was learning from work from the comfort of their home and generally still put in the 9-5 hours to make sure they can pay their mortgage. I don’t have a mortgage, I live in a van and Danny and I try to keep our living costs as…
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The North Coast 500 – The home straight
This will be my final update on our North Coast 500 journey, though they’ll be plenty of other Scotland-based content to come from the great places we stayed after we completed the NC 500 route. The last post ended as we began to head down the East coast and back towards Inverness. Now I won’t lie to you because that’s not my style, the East coast was a little bit less attractive than the West had been – and ain’t that always the way! Much like England (and I sincerely hope I don’t offend anyone by saying this) the east is not as nice as Wales and Cornwall on the…
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The North Coast 500 – Reaching the north coast of Scotland
When I last left you on our North Coast 5000 journey we had stopped in Gairloch, just 150 miles in and starting to climb up the West coast. This next instalment of our journey takes us all the way up and along the North coast of Scotland, to the highest point in the UK and to some of the most beautiful beaches we’ve ever seen. So let’s pick straight up where we left off! Day 4 – Ullapool – 198 miles in Ullapool is the biggest settlement in the north west of Scotland and the harbour there is a hub of activity, even now. When we arrived we were quite…
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The North Coast 500 – The first 150 miles
A few weeks back we completed the North Coast 500 which is a 500 mile road trip around the north of Scotland. The guide book we bought estimated that this would take us around a week, but we took a slight detour over to the Isle of Skye, so it actually took us about nine days to complete. If you’re considering the North Coast 500 or you’re looking for inspiration for your next road trip, we couldn’t recommend it enough! We picked an amazing time of year to come as we had beautiful weather, it was mostly sunny, it wasn’t too cold, but we also got to enjoy the odd…
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Van life – Our Scottish adventure so far!
At this point I probably shouldn’t even call myself a blogger as I haven’t put anything on here since 7th March! But as yesterday marked two weeks of living on the road, I thought it was about time I got something uploaded. We recently completed the North Coast 500 in Scotland and I’ll be writing a series of posts about this at a later date. But for now, I just wanted to make sure my fingers were still able to type and I was still able to string a mildly entertaining sentence together. So for those of you who aren’t on one of the 1,239,506 WhatsApp groups I’m a part…
