Reunited After Months Apart… And Life Will Be Different Now

If you're new here, hi I'm Jessica and I travel solo and full-time around Europe in my campervan Frodo with my puppy Heidi. Two years ago I left my old life behind, quit my job and sold most of my belongings for a simpler life off-grid on the road. Join us for this next chapter in our adventures where we reconnect with nature and grow roots in the wild. This is the time of year where the days are growing noticeably shorter and I take every opportunity I can to be outside before it gets too cold. The trees are slowly turning colours, the moss is glowing from the autumn rain and thousands of mushrooms are popping up around the forest. I never used to be an autumn or winter person if I'm completely honest. But being in my cosy van with a wood fire, a hot drink and good book has definitely changed that and now I'm excited like a child to witness the changing of the seasons through my little home on wheels. Hi everyone, I hope you've been doing well. I've been back in England for a couple of weeks now and whenever I return to the UK it tends to be a very busy time because I meet up with a I put Frodo through an MOTN service and he passed with flying colours which is amazing and yeah now I'm starting to slow down again which has been very nice. I've just been hiding away in the woods and now it's nearly time to drive over to Wales which is where Risi has moved to and spend some time with him. So I'm planning to spend about a month in Wales before moving on and then we're going to be apart again for a month and then we're going to spend his winter holidays together. So yeah I'm very excited to see him again. It's the longest we've been apart in two years and we do have a little surprise to share with you as well. Before I make my way there I'm going to a Ren Faire with my friend Dominique so I'll bring you along to that and then I shall continue my journey. My favourite thing about living alone in my van is the ability to take my girlfriends on little trips here and there. It was a very rainy weekend so throughout our time at the Renaissance Faire we made a little fire first thing in the morning and we would just invite people in to warm up or boil some water for a cup of tea and we just had such a lovely time despite the moody weather, escaping the human world for a whimsical weekend of magic and living our wildest fairy tale dreams. Good morning guys. We made it to Wales. We're parked here in the hills just a half hour drive away from the coast where Rizzi is. That drive ended up being a lot more difficult than anticipated. So essentially I got a flood warning kind of across mid Wales so I did the drive a day earlier than I had originally planned because I didn't want to deal with flooded roads. So I did the entire five and a half six hour drive in one afternoon evening. I arrived here at 10 o'clock in the evening and about half an hour before I arrived here I came across a road that was so flooded it had essentially merged with the river next to it and there was debris floating everywhere. The water came more than halfway up my tyres which was actually a bit scary. See it was really intense but I made it and yeah we're just sorting out a few bits and bobs. Rizzi is coming here and we're really excited to see him. Are you excited darling? Is Rizzi coming? Do you want to tell everyone what this is all about? This is my van. Basically I'm doing my master's and I was looking at rent and it was just quite expensive to be honest. Yeah. Rent is not very good value for money. It's quite a lot of money that just sort of disappears into nothingness. Which is why we started van life in the first place a few years ago. Yeah exactly so this is a way to avoid that really. I'm gonna live in this while I do my master's degree and then once I finish my master's it also gives me some freedom to go and visit Jess in Europe. I still want to get my boat afterwards but it gives me a land-based mode of transport as well so during the winter months when sailing isn't so good and also just when we're when we are together it gives us an element of freedom that we haven't had when you're sharing a space. Frodo is a smaller van anyway and also sometimes I want to do one thing you want to do another thing you've only got one vehicle between you. Yeah we also found that we really like having our own space during the day because we're both quite introverted and we like our peace and quiet so we think it's like a really good balance for us in our relationship to to be able to have those separate spaces during the day. Although realistically we'll still hang out a lot of the time but it's just nice to have that option. It took you two weeks to convert this van which is just bloody impressive. It was actually a bit less than two weeks and part of that was because I was rained off quite a lot as well I reckon it would have been about a week if I was doing it indoors. And you managed to use up most of the leftover building materials from my van which is really nice. Yeah there was very little wood left over by the time I was done. We are going to give you a little tour of Rissi's van in a minute but before we do that we want to talk about one of our top van life essentials and one of our favorite sustainable brands who are also the sponsor of today's video and that's no other than Surrey. Surrey makes sustainable electric toothbrushes and we've been using them for about three years now haven't we? Before I switched to Surrey I used to use bamboo toothbrushes until I learned that they're actually not that sustainable and I was also hesitant to buy an electric toothbrush because although I knew that they were technically better for your teeth there were just no good sustainable options on the market that I knew about. Surrey toothbrushes are made with an elegant aluminium body and a magnetic mirror mount and it actually stays on while driving too which is very cool. Surrey uses sonic clean technology which is dentist approved. It's really powerful but still gentle on your gums. It has two intensity settings which I really like because my teeth can get a bit sensitive sometimes. The battery is USB rechargeable and lasts over a month which is perfect when you live off grid. And of course the aspect that's most important to us is that Surrey are sustainable as well. The brush heads are plant-based and you can actually send them back to Surrey and they'll recycle them for free so nothing goes to landfill. It also comes with a travel case which is super handy and it cleans the brush using UVC light when you push this little button here. And you can also recharge the toothbrush inside the case which is really handy. Honestly once you try Surrey you'll never want to go back to any other toothbrush. If you want to try it you can get 20% off your Surrey toothbrush with our code ROOTS20 and we'll pop the link to their website in the video description. Thank you so much again to Surrey for sponsoring today's video and now let's do a little tour of Missy's van. So this is a Renault Kangoo Maxi. It's one of the largest vans of this kind of shape. Lengthwise was particularly important because I'm quite tall. A lot of them you can't lie down in if you're 187 centimeters but this one I fit in perfectly so it was primary choice for that. Super fuel efficient as well. I drove like many many hours and the fuel gauge barely moved. Nuts. So it's insulated with six millimeter dodo soundproofing which is both insulative and sound deadening. It's super easy to apply and it doesn't use much space which is the key thing when you've got a tiny van. And then I covered it in carpet which is not the tidiest of jobs but again it helps with insulation, it helps with moisture control, it helps with soundproofing and again uses very little space. So that is lined all over and then I've built this unit here which is kind of like my kitchen unit. It's got gas there because I just didn't have capacity to sort out a proper electric system. I'm not going to have solar. I'm going to be in Wales in the winter. Solar isn't an option so cooking on gas. That connects onto a sink and gas cooker here which currently I haven't finished setting up entirely but we're most of the way there. So I have food storage in here and same in here. I've got a shelf up here to keep bits and pieces on. More storage under here and under here and I've got two 10 liter water containers under here. One for fresh water, one for grey water and they can easily be picked up, taken out and either refilled or emptied. And then I have additional storage under here as well for various bits and pieces. A nice aesthetic bungee to keep it all in place. It's the kind of stuff that Jess would never let me get away with in the conversions I've done with her. So on this side I've got my clothes storage which is split up into little bags which sort of help me keep it all somewhat organized. So I have this table here which the actual table top was just an off cut of 12 mil ply from Jess's van and this is very adjustable. I can do it up and down that way. I can spin it around like this. I can sit on my bed and use it. I can stand here and have a little standing desk outside which is quite nice. It also can just come off and I can just tuck it down the back here when this door is closed. So normally I just tuck it down there, close this door and that's where it lives when I'm asleep. There's loads of storage underneath the bed which currently I'm using for my outdoor stuff. So my bed is 190 centimeters long. Width wise it's slightly thinner than a regular single bed but it does have a bit that pulls out which is not fully finished just yet but the infrastructure is there so that it can add however far this is to stretch out to a bit bigger than a single bed. Roughly equivalent to a small double. So this has mostly tools in it. Screws, spanners, all that kind of stuff. I don't know if I'm going to keep them with me in the long term but while I'm still kind of doing the odd job on my van it makes sense to keep them there but I don't know what else I would keep there if I got rid of them. I've already got quite a lot of empty space in the van so I just don't have much stuff. One thing I have considered which it's not going to be immediate because I like the fact that this from the outside just looks like a regular tradie van but once I finish doing my masters and I don't feel like I need to be so stealthy I think I can fit a little wood burner here because I don't really need to use the side doors. I come in and out through the back. These doors have no handle on them which means you can open them from the outside but from the inside you have to go out the back. Lastly I have my electric system which is quite small but it works super well in such a small van. It is a Bluetti which is the same brand that Jess has in Frodo. 450 watt hours and it's super handy because it's quite small I'm actually able to take it to a coffee shop or recharge it at the library or at the university or something like that and it is enough to keep my laptop charged for many hours and I can also run lights off it. I quite like that it fits either underneath my bed or if I'm sat in the front working I can pop it here and plug into it and then I've just got my cable going around into the into the passenger seat where I often sit and work. That was my van tour and once I've finished doing my sort of remaining bits and bobs Jess might help me give it a little bit of an aesthetic overhaul and try and make it a little bit more pretty. I'm gonna have to rein her in a bit because I think she's a little bit enthusiastic about that but there are a few things that I think her touch would be appreciated for. There are some people in life who will always stay with you even if you're thousands of miles apart. It doesn't really matter if that's a friendship or relationship but those people have always been an anchor for me, a constant in the ever-changing journey that is life and when you live nomadically those people become even more important. They grow with you even if not always in the same direction and stay by your side through it all. I've always had a strange relationship with the concept of home. I left my homeland at a very young age, lived in a bunch of different countries and moved dozens of times as a young adult. When I was about 14 I wrote a song about only ever feeling truly at home in nature and that song was called Roots in the Wild. So being back in this part of Wales where Risi and I first met and lived together for three years feels very nostalgic, almost like the only home I'd ever known, one that had slipped through my fingers just as I was starting to belong. This is probably the last time we'll ever spend an extended period of time in this area so I intend to soak it all in as much as possible and cement the windswept hills, wild seas and winding rivers in my memory for the rest of my life. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did do leave it a thumbs up and subscribe so you don't miss our next adventures. Until then take good care of yourselves. Bye.