I Waited Three Years for This Moment

I've been in these mountains for the last few weeks now and I've watched them shed the last remnants of winter and transform as summer arrived here at altitude. I don't know if you ever get this kind of feeling but I've been drawn to this area for years and part of me was scared that if I finally got here I would never want to leave. And in a way that fear has come true because I could see myself spending the rest of my life here surrounded by the high peaks, swimming in alpine lakes and sitting in wildflower meadows. But by the end of this week I was actually glad to be moving on but I'll get to that in a bit. If you're new here I'm Jessica and I've been living on the road for the last three years traveling to the quieter corners of Europe in my campervan Frodo with my adventure pup Heidi and looking for a place to eventually call home. Join me as I spend the first days of summer here in the Dolomites and grow roots in the wild. I really love the transition that happens at the start of summer when I spend more and more of my day outside until eventually my van serves more as a loose base than a full-time home. My showers are dips in rivers and lakes, I eat my meals sitting in the grass, I'm out all day walking the hills and this is what living in a van is really all about for me. Keeping my outgoing slow so I can live closer to the way humans evolved to live. So I've been in the Dolomites for three weeks now and when I first arrived here I was genuinely so overwhelmed because the area is so much bigger than I thought it was. I thought it was this tiny mountain range but no it's massive and when I first arrived I was in the western Dolomites now I'm in the east and I've also been exploring the south a little bit so I've been in pretty much every corner of the Dolomites now and I've got a pretty good grip on it now. And this is also the reason why I really like staying in an area for longer because I do like to do the popular hikes but I don't just want to tick off tourist destinations. I really like discovering hidden gems and hikes that the locals do you know and speaking of locals oh my goodness guys I will be looking at land in the Dolomites in a few days. So this week will be spent hiking, I'm going to do a lot of hiking this week and camping at high altitude and next week I'm driving to the foothills of the Dolomites and I'll be looking at land. I do a whole video about this because maybe not all of you are interested in it but yeah I'm really excited and anxious about it because I kind of spontaneously set up the appointment because I realized that a piece of land that I had been looking at and dreaming of for months is actually really close to where I am so I thought why not you know it is coming towards the end of shoulder season now and I can already tell that it's starting to get a bit busier in this region so I'm gonna try and get all of my hiking done this week and then move on. I don't really like to be in areas that are really busy because I feel like it makes van life more complicated and less relaxed so hopefully everything will go smoothly and I'll take you along with me as I explore these beautiful mountains. If you've been here for a while you will know that part of the reason I travel in a van is because I have no idea where in the world I want to grow roots. You probably won't be surprised that I'm looking for somewhere surrounded by wild nature with lots of nice hikes nearby where it's easy to live off-grid and sunny enough to grow my own food and be as self-sufficient as possible and it also needs to be quiet and far from any main road so part of my mission this month has been to scout different corners of this area and see how many boxes it takes. So my van gave me a service warning on the drive this morning which doesn't really make sense because I had him serviced like a thousand miles ago and I conveniently ignored it before my hike because I just didn't want to deal with it before my hike but I probably shouldn't be ignoring it. I always feel really uncomfortable driving anywhere when there's any warning light so I'm gonna check it out maybe it's just the coolant or maybe I need to top up the oil after a thousand miles I don't know I'm gonna check and hopefully I'm not gonna have to spend time at the mechanic this week because I just want to spend the whole week hiking I don't want to spend time at the mechanics. No service light! The engine coolant is running a bit low and I also just realized that I'm running low on food so I think I'm gonna go to town and do some chores this afternoon because I finished my hike a lot earlier than expected actually this morning and I know you guys want to see more of this kind of stuff so I'm gonna take you along for an afternoon of doing chores. Living in a van means you have to constantly adapt to your surroundings, where you sleep, where you cook and how you get water. Last week I spent one night at a campsite to get all my chores done but this week I was quoted 200 euros just to park and empty my toilet and bin so I had to drive around a little bit instead. And in touristy places like the Dolomites I've had to learn to flip my entire routine. These days I get up before sunrise to avoid the crowds. I'm inside during the hottest part of the day and back out during golden hour. But there is one part of my routine which hasn't changed at all in the three years I've lived on the road and that's my toothbrush from Surrey, who are the sponsor of today's episode. Surrey make electric toothbrushes with an elegant aluminium body and dentist approved sonic clean technology. They're powerful but still gentle on your gums with two intensity settings, which I really like because my teeth can get a little bit sensitive. My favourite thing is that the battery lasts over a month which is perfect for life on the road. It's USB rechargeable using this travel case which also cleans the brush head with UVC light. The brush heads are made of plant-based materials and you can send them back to Surrey and then recycle them for free so nothing goes to landfill. I was a bit anxious about switching to an electric toothbrush while living in a van but it's been genuinely the best decision I ever made for my teeth and I would never go back to using a normal toothbrush. If you want to try Surrey you can get 15% off all colours and bundles with my code ROOTSINTHEWILD and I also leave the link down in the video description. Right so it's one of those days where none of my hose attachments fit so this is my alternative method. I fill up my collapsible bucket and I stick my camping shower in and then I just walk back and forth between the water tap and here with my jerry can and rather than faffing around with my hose attachments or looking for a different water tap I just fill it up with my camping shower and be done with it. It's been a very hot day today so I'm gonna have a very light dinner and I learned that this region is very famous for its mushrooms so I got a local mushroom mix from the supermarket and I'm gonna make some pasta with fennel, the seitan tomato sauce and some organic spaghetti. If I'm completely honest I've been struggling a little with the realities of living in a touristy place recently. I'm someone who really enjoys solitude and being far from civilization but now that summer is here it's been getting increasingly more difficult to find secluded spots. But there is one place I've been wanting to see the entire time I was here, somewhere I've been dreaming about for the last three years. It's a chain of peaks purged high on a mountain pass that's closed for the colder half of the year. So I've been patiently waiting for that pass to reopen so I could finally see that place through my own eyes and now the time had finally come. So today I was supposed to go to the one place that I wanted to see the most in the Dolomites. It's one of the main reasons I came here because I really wanted to see that place. However you can only get to it via a 60 euro toll road and it wasn't open when I first arrived here because of all the snow and I did actually try and hike up from lower elevation but the trail was blocked by recent rockfall so I had to turn back because it wasn't safe. And now I've booked the toll road. You have to book it in advance because it gets booked up very quickly. I am a two and a half hour drive away in a valley and there were thunderstorms forecast this evening and I was just getting ready to leave and now there's a thunderstorm right above me and I can't drive away because I need to get something off the roof. Did you hear that? And climbing onto a metal roof when there's a thunderstorm above me is not a great idea. Now I'm really scared that lightning's gonna strike the valley and it's gonna be really loud. I'm surrounded by mountains and there's no trees right next to me but it is a bit anxiety inducing and I need to... my slot for the parking is at five o'clock and it's now three so I'm already running late. So I really hope I'm not going to miss it. I really hope I'm going to make it. I made it onto the mountain. I am parked at 2300 meters elevation and right now it's 4 30 in the morning. I've been awake since four because I really want the trail to myself and I'm about to hike up to that place I've been dreaming of for years. Well that hike was more challenging than I thought it would be. Heidi is really tired too. The sun was coming up more quickly than I thought it would. We left at 4 30 and we were like halfway up at five in the morning and I had to speed hike up the mountain because we were losing the good light but we got there. It was very magical. It's the kind of place you just can't really comprehend unless you've seen it with your own eyes. The mountains here are just so tall and so dramatic. I'm really glad to have seen it. Heidi and I just had some breakfast. I'm having another cup of coffee and then I'm going to do the other hike here. It is nine o'clock now, nearly nine, and it is quite busy now but we did pay 60 euros for the toll road so I kind of want to do the other hike which is 10 kilometers and I'm already quite sore so I hope it'll be okay. I think most people don't do the full 10 kilometer loop so it might be a little bit busy at the start but hopefully not all the way. So we're about three kilometers in and I do have to say that every time I do one of these really popular famous hikes, this is like probably the most famous hike in the Dolomites, every time I do one of these hikes I'm really underwhelmed and this is also the case here unfortunately. The scenery is obviously spectacular as you can see but it's just so busy and the trail itself isn't that great and there's rubbish on the trail obviously because it's quite popular and I do see the irony of you know me coming to these trails and being a part of the problem of course but yeah it just reminds me why I tend to not go to touristy spots you know because I think it's all just marketing you know they're just not really worth the hype. It's also pretty much the reason why I almost entirely stopped mentioning any exact place names or trail names in my videos because I don't want to make the problem worse and I also feel like if you want to go out and be in nature there's so many hidden gems that you can discover just you know looking around you looking what's near you and looking on maps and all that stuff and those kind of places are often 10 times better than the really famous ones like this place I think it doesn't even make my top five hikes in this area so I mean you know it's nice but definitely not one of the best I've done you know what I mean. So yeah I've gone off trail a little bit and I'm kind of cutting across the trail here and there just to have a bit of a quieter time and I think after this we're gonna have a little nap in the van and drive down the mountain and go somewhere quieter oh no now a crowd of people is following us because they think it's a photo spot oh no oh no we must flee although I struggled with the crowds on that particular trail it struck me that for a lot of people the social element was probably part of what they enjoyed about it even if that made it feel more like a theme park to me and that's really the beautiful thing about the outdoors there's something out there for everyone and for me it was time to drive to lower elevation away from the photo spots and into a quieter corner of these mountains and it is here that I would look at the piece of land a place that might be where I eventually park my van for good but that's a story for another time