10: From Snow to Sun

Jan 20 2019

It’s mid-January and Simone has been wearing shorts for the past two days.

Don’t worry, van life hasn’t driven us crazy, nor have we become hardcore outdoorsy Wim Hof enthusiasts. We’ve made it to Spain!

I’m not sure if we’re excited to be here, or just excited to be out of France. Either way, our spirits are buzzing. We’ve had the door open all afternoon and ate lunch sprawled out on the grass under a sunshiney blue sky, and its reminded us how van life isn’t about living in a van, it’s about being at home in the world.

Since the last flop of an update, we’ve had some good luck come our way. Most importantly, we’re no longer stranded in a hotel - we have Snail back! Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite a happy ending, because we ended up getting ripped off again meaning the breakdown costed three times more than it should have done, as well as taking a face-palming 22 days from us. But we’re not dwelling on it, and after having freedom and control taken away from us for a while, every moment on the road now is an absolute gift.

Since getting Snail back, we’ve been catching up on lost ground. Snail munched through two tanks of fuel in two days as we powered out of France as quick as we could, and into the Pyrenees mountains. We felt like winners again swinging open the doors of our home to the foot of a white giant, where we had an impromptu ski holiday.

It felt like a dream to be able to ski to our door every day. We found ourselves saying ‘this is our life?!’ to each other again. A life we had built like a constant holiday - or more so, a life that we don’t need to take a vacation from.

We were somewhere between crafty DIYers and shambling amateurs - fashioning our bike helmets, Simone’s ski gloves for children aged 12 years, and layering up clothes like Mr Blobby to make up for our lack skiing attire. (But hey, we just had a ski holiday for a slither of the normal price.)

‘How do you put skis on again?’ Simone shouted as I hobbled along to the ski lift where a resort worker hesitantly watched us flop around like baby pengins, before the lift ripped us off our feet and up the mountain. We pep talked each other ‘all we need is confidence’. We’d done our first ski holiday last year following a handful of lessons - not a single thing we could remember as we peered over the top of the first slope.

We threw ourselves down, and after a wobbly start, were snaking the slopes with powdery parallel turns. By the end of the first snowy day where we’d been falling through clouds at the mountain tops which made me feel like I had cataracts, we were tackling steep red slopes, but had both taken some punches from the mountain.

Feeling like bruised fruit the next morning, we skipped a day of skiing to hike up the surrounding mountains. Amongst snowball fights and braving stepping over frozen streams, we immersed ourselves in the powerful silence of the giants, bathing in the bluest sky we’d ever seen and reminiscing how we’d breathe in blackened London air and deny ourselves the crisp breaths we were enjoying right now. Walking past mountain shacks Simone said ‘it would be amazing to have a mountain getaway like that’. And from the high terrain, we could see the speck of a snowy Snail. ‘We already do, we live here now’.

The next two days we hit the slopes, under perfect blue skies. We had the resort pretty much to ourselves; the mountains were ours. There was no where else we’d rather have been. I’ll always remember shooting across the slopes at speed, rhythmically curving with Simone so every few seconds we were inches apart before separating again. We were racing down in a blur, but locking eyes in slow motion.

We had a few close shaves that made us realise how important our legs were when travelling with no doctor. After Simone finished giggling at me sliding 10 meters down a steep slope with my skis in the air like I’d slipped on a banana skin, she then fell over, which I reciprocated with laughter until Simone kept sliding down and down the slope until she disappeared into a gully on one side. In my horror I shot to the edge of the slope not knowing how deep the ditch was. ‘Is it a river? There are huge rocks everywhere. Simone! She’s not answering..!?’

Up she crawled without a scratch. ‘I was just lying in the snow for a minute wondering if anything was broken and how I got here’.

I had a close one, unavioidably finding myself speeding up a large ramp with no idea how far the drop was on the other side, flying two meters into air and landing in an almost-splits position, with both skis and poles flying off in every direction, splitting my trousers at the groin. Smooth.

We took it easy after that one. With a van as elderly and tempermental as Snail, we can’t be broken too. Despite her having a shiney new prop shaft, something seems to break every few days at the moment.

Turning off her ignition won’t actually turn her engine off half the time. We’ve worked out we need to put her into reverse gear and wait a minute until she eventually shuts off. (?!)

Sometimes the side door doesn’t open, despite being unlocked. When we’re inside the van we can get her open with a bit of a kick, but when we’re on the outside looking in, it’s not so easy. We’ve found the only way is for me to squeeze myself through the small hatch between the front and the back, so I can then kick it from the inside. It has to be me because Simone’s bum doesn’t fit. It must be a funny sight through the front windscreen seeing Simone pushing my almost vertical legs through the small hole in the wood.

Snail’s front lights need a wiggle of the wires to work. (Before my Mum freaks out seeing this, we are going to get a soldering iron and set them properly - but for now, we’re driving only in the day). The darkness caught up with us on an unlit mountain road yesterday. Simone ran around the front of the van, bonnet up, twiddling with wires until the lights flashed on. This is how we roll.

Oh, and I also have a lovely sight of part of Snail’s wheel as I’m driving due to her rust flaking away as usual.

‘What next Snail?’ Has become a bit of a daily mantra. But there’s a charm to it somewhere. —Just please get us through the trip, Snail.—

So now we’re in sunny Spain, en-route to Barcelona for tapas and salsa dancing, and seeing the sea for the first time in two months since hitting land-locked Europe. It feels like our winter is over, since we’ve hit double-digit temperature territory, with our route only getting hotter from here.

I’ll be looking back at these icy times in Snail with pride. We’ve thickened our skins living closer to the elements, managing to withstand nights dropping to -10 degrees, with stalagmites forming on the inside of Snail - and honestly been comfortable. We’ve been warrior women of nature foriging and chopping our own firewood to keep us warm, with the wholesome smugness of knowing the earth is heating us for free. But now with a warmer world as our playground, the van life we’ve been waiting for begins.

Love

Becky and Simone