Digital Hippies — Life, Family & Work
Does your life feels boring? Do you want to escape the mainstream routine and collect remarkable experiences? Would you like to make your kids happier?
Does your life feels boring? Do you want to escape the mainstream routine and collect remarkable experiences? Would you like to make your kids happier? Try to live on the road for a few months — it is huge a value changer & you will learn so much more about your family & yourself.
Our slow travels are not about seeing monuments or well known sites, shooting a few selfies there, buying a magnet or other souvenir and leaving. No. What we try to do it cut ourselves off the mediocre life, leave the comfort zone and just live a happier life. Even if that might sound cheesy, our campervan reality proves it is working like that.
Compared to airborn slow-travel digital nomads (flying around with a backpack) we are less dependent on civilization and we are more in control of our time and place. We might not be as clean every morning, as fresh with shiny clothes, but experience unexpected fun almost every day.
Family From a Caravan & Now Campervan
We love travels. Once we had kids, we just adapted the form of travels to it. A few weeks became months and car became a caravan and later campervan. Our kids love it, they are somewhere in Europe with us every spring since they were 4 months and 2 years old.
Instagram was a few years old at that time, so nothing like #vanlife or #digitalnomad existed. It is a completely different story today, when everybody is making their own DIY campers and shoot beautiful sunsets and sea views. It becomes almost surreal in some cases where the photo is more important than the experience itself. On the other hand, many families escape the traditional life these years, and they love it! And it is a wave of joy!
[our family photo]
Is It Easy To Travel in a Van with Family?
Reality is never as beautiful as the photos, right? After 7 years of camper travels, or 2 years, if we count all the time spent on the road, we can say it is as beautiful. But also it is not for everybody. To buy a caravan or make a basic van is simple. What is the challenge is to be ale to survive with your partner, or even kids, and be able to make enough money and have time to enjoy the ride. That could bring some challenges.
Our trips are a symbol of the spring. We chase the sun after cold winters, and we look forward to the new experiences every single year. No matter if we share the photos from the trip or if we look cool. Simply the experiences themselves is what we enjoy.
I would call us digital hippies. We work with the professional equipment such as laptops, camper cars and other devices. But we also switch that off pretty often to be offline, to just be in the sand on the beach, to be unshaved, sometimes hungry or happy with a basic food. We just enjoy the simple life pleasures that so many of us have forgotten — sunshine, rain sounds, ocean waves and stories of people we meet. We are full of happiens on the trips as we don't watch news and just live a simple life. But it was not as balanced from the day one. We needed some practice.
After 2 Years → Survivors Become Kings
Ok, let's put aside the pink glasses. There's a huge difference between enhanced photo on Instagram and everyday reality on a surface big a little over two beds. Honestly — you would enjoy many “happy” moments, such as:
- You would need to monitor water levels in your tanks
- Sometimes you will be tired from the days drive and there would not be safe sleep spot around, or washing machine, or a decent restaurant
- You might have empty batteries, something will break on the car while kids will be screaming and on the exact day when you promised to deliver work for a client this morning
- You will be out of gas for heating, when the coldest night will strike and all gas stations will be closed for the weekend
- You will enter a campsite, pay your hard earned money, hoping for a perfect service, and you will find dirty backyard without solid internet, with brown water, cold showers and toilets looking like there was a hardcore drinking party last night
- Your toilet will be full and there would be no place to empty it
But it would still be fun — because these things will not happen on a same day.
[broken window + missing solar on caravan +popisky do fotky]
The main difference is in your view angle and expectations. You might want to control things which are out of your control and it will harm you when it does not happen as you thought it would. Once you free yourself from those things, you will gain much more freedom & happiness.
Even that we have travelled a lot, I still learn. And I spent over a year studying the caravanning options before we buought our first righ. And then you see guys and girls that just look at the Instagram flow of gorgeous backdoor views and what they see is life with just party time, so they buy a van and get a facepalm from the real reality.
Sustainable Rubber Tramp Travels
Almost everyone fears the small space. What that mean is, that we all live lives where we almost don't meet each other.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rxex4m18g0pkOU3g2pAGtDL2oXrGTsAqd-E-PP0NYco
