After 3 Years Living In a Van, I’m Tired.

I've been traveling for more than three years now, and in the last year alone I slept in over a hundred different places. And as much as I'm grateful to be living this life and waking up in nature every day, lately I've been growing a bit weary of it. The constant moving around, making decisions every day, and not knowing where I belong. The days have been cold and stormy here in the mountains of Norway, and I found myself in a bit of a funk. And I've been struggling to admit that to myself, because traveling has been my biggest dream for most of my life. But like any lifestyle, it comes with its challenges. And lately I've been dreaming of something new. A home base somewhere. Not to stop traveling completely, but to have a place to come back to, and somewhere to belong. It's a strange thing to feel a dream come towards its end, and not knowing if you'll be just as happy in what comes after. But nothing lasts forever in life, and I think maybe it's time for the next chapter. This video was made possible by Quiberty. I've been parked on a mountain pass for the last couple of days overlooking a glacier, which was so magical, but it was very cold up there. It was like five degrees celsius with icy winds and horizontal rain all day, every day. So I drove down the mountain and found this place by a river, which is still very rainy, but at least there's some breaks in the rain, and it's more like 10-15 degrees. And it's the quietest place I've found in my entire time in Norway, so it just feels like my nervous system can finally exhale a little bit. I've been thinking a lot about what direction I want my life to go in recently, because I'm starting to feel like my full-time traveling days are coming to an end. And being in Norway has really intensified those feelings, because I found van life quite difficult here to be honest. Summer is very short here, and turns out that that means that it's very very busy. Everyone is out and about, there's a lot of motorhomes everywhere, and lots of people go hiking, which is beautiful. It's great that people are so outdoorsy here, but it's just not been as quiet and peaceful as I expected it to be, considering the low population density. And I think living here would be absolutely amazing, but being in a van has been very different from how I do van life usually, being in very isolated places. So I've been struggling a bit with that, and according to the locals I've been speaking to, it's like the rainiest and coldest summer in quite a few years. It's been like 10 degrees most days in July, I've only had one day where the sun came out for a couple of hours. So yeah, it's been really really harsh actually, the conditions have been quite difficult. So recently I've been really craving a home base, you know, somewhere that I can return to for a few weeks when things are difficult, and I need a break from traveling. And I just don't have that, you know, I don't have family with enough space that I can easily stay there. And yeah, I'm someone who, when I've wanted a change in my life historically, I would bring about that change immediately. So when I was tired of living in a country, I would move to a different country. And when I was tired of working a nine-to-five, I would become self-employed within a few months. And I'm someone who really takes action on those feelings when I feel like it's time to start a new life chapter. But when you're ready to stop traveling and settle down, and you live on very little money, it's a very long process because I have to save up money for the deposit, which takes a long time. I have to deal with bureaucracy and research, and I don't even know what country I want to live in. And I'm in this strange in-between place where I feel like I'm ready for the next chapter, but the next chapter isn't ready for me. And I have to put a lot of time and work into making that happen, which has been wearing at me to be honest, because it just feels like such a big task. So I'm definitely not writing off Norway as a place to live. It's still very much on the table. It's just full-time van life in particular that I found difficult here. But I think if I had a nice little house in the middle of nowhere in the countryside, that would be a very different story. So the search is definitely still ongoing. And then there's the property in Italy. I know a lot of you have been asking about that, and the most recent update is that we're still negotiating with the owner, and it's still a very big unknown. But yeah, that's the only place that I felt a really deep emotional connection to as soon as I stepped onto that land. I felt this very strange sense of belonging, you know, like coming home. And I'm trying very hard not to get too attached to that place, but I'm afraid that ship has sailed. But I'm still looking at other places and keeping an open mind, because I think that I owe it to myself to look at other places and not commit to the first one that I fall in love with. And I think it's also the responsible thing to do as a first-time buyer, you know, because I want it to be my forever home. So yeah, I'm still looking around, also considering other countries in Europe, doing a bunch of research of, you know, what life would look like in different countries. And in many ways, Norway would make my life a lot easier, because houses are a lot cheaper here. Some of them are so cheap I could pay them off in a few years. I'm trying to follow my heart, but also go about it strategically and logically, which is, you know, not an easy balance to strike. So yeah, that's been me the last few weeks. A lot of reflections and emotions, and I just felt like sharing that stage with you as well in all its messiness. There is a gap in the rain right now, so I'm going to make the most of it and go and forage some bilberries, which I saw on my walk with Heidi yesterday, because they are abundant here and so delicious. I've been really enjoying reading up on Norse mythology recently, and the way it varies between regions as well as landscapes. The mountains you saw at the start of the video were thought to be ancient sleeping giants, while according to the folk stories, these wooden gorges are home to hidden people who would play their fiddles, and locals would carry their songs back to their villages. Even the bilberries have their own stories attached to them, and traditional Norwegian and Sami people would use them as natural remedies for a number of ailments. The deepest and darkest corners of the forest are home to the famous trolls, who avoid sunlight and come out after dusk. They are fierce guardians of nature, and the stories tell that if you stay in the forest too long out of greed, the trolls will trap you in it, which is why foragers to this day avoid picking the best patches, out of respect for the forest's true owners. Are you waiting for me to pick the blueberries? Are you waiting for me? What a good girl you are. My partner Risi has been down in the fjords for the last few weeks while I've been up in the Arctic, and honestly, most of the big conversations we've had about where we go next and whether we could see ourselves living here have happened over the phone, while we've been a two-day drive apart. Which only works because I never have to worry about signal, thanks to today's sponsor Quiberty, who are the longest supporter of this channel. Quiberty's eSims work in over 190 countries, and everything is digital. There's no physical sim, no hunting for a phone shop in the nearest village, and no contract. You just pick a plan, scan a QR code, and you're connected in a couple of minutes. I'm on their global plan, and I've crossed from Italy to Germany to Sweden and Norway this summer, and my data has just followed me wherever I go. And when you sim a remote, that's not just convenient, it also means having access to maps, weather reports, which is much needed in Norway, and being able to reach the people you love when your plans change. If you want to try Quiberty, you can get 15% off your eSim with my code ROOTS15, and I'll also leave the link down in the video description. I found some wild strawberries growing right behind the van, which is super lush because I want to make a Norwegian dish called rødmekrød, I believe. It's essentially porridge with sour cream and strawberries, but I don't have sour cream, I couldn't find a dairy-free version, so I'm going to use coconut yogurt. And I mostly have bilberries, so having a few strawberries will help me bring it a little bit closer to the original dish. I've been noticing more and more how my favourite moments are increasingly the ones where I'm not going anywhere. Just pottering about my van, cooking, and reading a book surrounded by birdsong and the rushing of the river. Maybe that's just getting older, but when I find places like this one, I always feel torn between the feeling of wanting to stay there for weeks and explore all the local trails, and on the other hand, wanting to keep moving and make the most of not being bound to a place while it lasts. I guess that's the weird thing about being in a state of transition, feeling neither here nor there. So I've been trying to just be in the and take things one day at a time to avoid feeling too overwhelmed. Best porridge of my life, not even exaggerating. I am attempting to hike up the tallest waterfall in Norway today, which is 275 metres or 900 feet. It is less rainy than it has been, which means it's still raining, just not as heavily. So hopefully the trail will be okay, but we'll see how it goes. One thing that has really surprised me about Norway is how tough a lot of the trails are. I've been climbing mountains on my own for more than 10 years now, but on this trip I've been defeated and forced to turn around a few times because the terrain can be so steep, rocky, and very muddy because of the frequent rain. But although this trail was 16 kilometres or 10 miles in total, it almost felt like a gift because it was really easy for the most part and it was only raining for half of it, which I was grateful for because my abilities have really been challenged on this trip. I've been thinking a lot about how the way we live our lives defines so much of our identity. So many see ourselves through the places we live, the work we do, or the people we live with and not so much through our personalities or dreams. We say I am a nurse, I am from Wales, I am a van lifer, as if those categories and the individual were the same thing. I've been falling into that thought pattern too and lately I've been asking myself who am I once I'm not the girl who travels in her van anymore? Who am I once I move on from the biggest dream I've ever had that's shaped so much of my life? It feels strange to grieve something you're choosing to let go of because no one is taking this life away from me, I'm choosing to walk away from it and somehow that makes it feel almost more difficult. But the more I've been sitting with that question, the more I'm realising that I've never been just the girl who lives in a van, I'm the girl who's been looking for a home in the wild. The van was never the dream but the vehicle for that dream quite literally and what I was really looking for in every forest park up and every quiet morning by a river in the last three years was the feeling of waking up inside nature and belonging there. I think when we first start living our dreams we assume that they will last for the rest of our lives but the reality is that our dreams grow in the same way we do as people and I think that part of me has always known that van life would always be just one chapter in the book.