8: When Van Life Goes Wrong

Dec 12, 2018

It snowed last night. After being teased with snowflakes on the weather forecast for weeks, it finally happened.

It actually made a lot of sense when we swung the doors open to a white carpet because last night was absolutely the coldest we’ve been so far. After dreaming about being somewhere freezing without a coat, the cold actually shook me from my sleep last night. Simone slept in a beanie hat.

Snail feels like a wintery cabin right now, with her brown and beige skin bursting from the white which surrounds her. We’ve had the chimney smoking all morning; there will always be something fuzzy about being warm and safe while the world outside bites. We’ve both just had a steamy shower, the water for which we boiled on the top of the furnace. It felt like an alpine sauna; the smell of burning kindling drifting into our wood-lined shower room, as the fire warmed our towels for a toasty post-shower hug.

We’ve had a strange time recently. Plans changing, things breaking, accidents happening. It was bound to happen eventually, but we seem to have had a concentrated bout of bad luck in the past two days.

Yesterday we found ourselves with freezing toes while German police took our passports and inspected Snail for an hour. We had a mini van crash.

While driving down what might as well have been a single track road, Snail lost her ear while another van passed at speed. The other guy’s flashy new van lost only the plastic off the back of the wing-mirror, while Snail had hers smashed straight through. He blamed us for being too far over, and insisted he call the police.

I felt for the police officers, with guns on their belts and stern faces, whose job had resided to measuring the size of the road and the van with a long stick, and doing 45 minutes of paperwork for a broken wing-mirror. I’m sure this wasn’t what they signed up for when they decided to join the police force. Regardless, we were completely calm and content through the whole process, we made peace with the other guy, claimed it was no one’s fault, and the police escorted us to a mechanic’s shop who taped a new mirror onto Snail for a tenner.

Although I surprisingly wasn’t phased by it at the time, the accident does highlight how vulnerable we are. 10cm to the left and we would have had a head-on collision and our trip (and our home), would be over.

The crash happened as we were detouring from our original route after another let-down that day. I’d made an awesome plan for us for the run up to new year, where we’d go from Christmas markets in Cologne, to finding a vegan Frankfurter in Frankfurt, then going to a natural spa in the Black Forest, then getting a stein of beer in Munich, then through to Salzburg in Austria for a romantic pre-Christmas experience, then to spending our first Christmas alone in a snowy Austrian forest, before heading to Venice for a few days, then Rome for New Year.

But as temperatures have started to drop (-11 degrees this week in Salzburg), an impending doom arose in me about driving this three tonne lump through snow and ice up mountain paths. During our research for snow chains for our wheels ahead of the decent to the alps (and after advice from my concerned mother), we realised it was actually illegal to drive through Austria without ‘winter tyres’, and we may have been signing ourselves up for a death sentence.

Risk vs reward is always the ultimate choice. And risk is something we had to be very comfortable with when moving into a van. But now we’re here, we can no longer afford to take risks, when our whole world is rolling on these wheels.

So yesterday we changed our route and we’re currently near the border of Luxembourg. Instead, we’re going to venture all the way to the bottom of France, then around the alps, and get to Italy that way. Average temperatures are going to be about 10 degrees warmer than we’ve been experiencing recently. We’ve had our share of the cold, we’ve seen the snow, I think it’s about time for us to migrate south.

The cold weather, despite having it’s cosy benefits, has started to frustrate us. Mostly because it’s stopping us from spending much time outside: we’re having nature withdrawal symptoms. Combine that with the fact that we’ve been having some power issues recently, and no internet connection (which means we’ve barely been able to have any music sessions) - our tethers have been fraying.

We’ve been in Europe for almost a month, and the best part of three weeks were spent in the Netherlands - because it’s one of our favourite countries - but also because we were waiting for our best friend to visit in Amsterdam. Turns out the Netherlands is a very small country so we were struggling to drive for more than around half an hour a day. Our engine powers our batteries, so no driving = no power. We were finding our batteries would go flat throughout the evening, meaning one by one, our lights would go off and we’d be sat in the back of the van in complete darkness (until I revved the engine enough to get them back on again).

Over time we noticed our power was draining quicker than it used to, and assumed we’d broken our batteries by running them so low so often. So we went to a battery specialist in Belgium, where four or five men all agreed that our batteries were ‘kaput’ and we’d need to fork out about 500 Euros to get everything working again. And pay 55 Euros just for them to look at it. We managed to get out of paying and never went back.

We keep witnessing how people try to take advantage of us, I feel because we are two women on the road. We will not fall for it.

Turns out we were right not to trust them because when we got to Cologne two days ago, we spoke to a fantastic German mechanic who said our batteries were fine, and our 2000 watt inverter was the reason our batteries were draining. He replaced it with a smaller one (for free - the labour should have costed 80 euros), and we bought some cables so we can connect to external electricity sources (which are everywhere and sometimes free in Europe) and got it all sorted for 200 Euros. Fingers crossed it holds out.

Now we have power, we can start being creatively productive again, which is where we are most happy. We launched our music project this week, Weird Ears, where we’re going to share everything we create in the van, including ‘van jams’ - live sessions in Snail, the first one of which is now live.

To sum it all up, we’ve spent most of a month in a creatively frustrating space where our power has stopped us from making music, all cumulating in a Van Gogh style finale of Snail’s left ear being cut off. It feels kinda fitting with the name of our new project that Snail now has weird ears.

But the dust (or snow) has settled, and I expect now we’re going to be entering an indulgent creative time in the run up to Christmas as we evade the cold, hammer our way through France, spend Christmas Day in a literal winter wonderland in an alpine forest in northern Italy, and emerge in the warmer south Italian climates in a few weeks time.

Here’s hoping the fact I’ve broken two mirrors in 24 hours has cancelled each other out and we’ve had our bad luck for the time being.

P.s. this has been a pretty grey sounding blog (as I wanted to highlight how van life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows) but we’ve had an amazing time the past few weeks with some of our favourite people. We spent five days in Amsterdam with our best friend Luke, then a week later surprised our oldest pal Ruby in Brugges, and visited Simone’s family twice in Rotterdam. As well as being a reminder of how lucky we are that our daily lives are the equivalent of our friend’s holidays, we’ve noticed how our connections haven’t changed at all despite never seeing our pals anymore. I guess real friendships never fade.

Lots of love,

Becky and Simone