2001 - a van odyssey

Ever since we began our motorhome 'odyssey' back in 2013 I have kept a tally of miles travelled and days on the road. For the past seven years on New Year's day along with making some  resolution or other that I had no intention of keeping, I  meticulously update a spreadsheet then post a screenshot of it to the blog.

As you might expect the 'metrics' for 2021 are distinctly underwhelming, a mere 30 days in Europe and a paltry 2731 miles travelled. However, purely through happenstance, this year the numbers notched-up a significant milestone - exactly 1000 days of wandering about since 2013. Further investigation turned up other random numbers, a total of 54,176 motorhome miles travelled, prompting according to the Blogger dashboard - 734 posts. I estimate that must be at least three quarters of a million words! So, the van averages 30mpg, the driver 75wpm; no I am not talking about typing speed, I mean words per mile.

Day 1001, a sleepover on Portmouth Docks... Santander here we come!

To begin at the beginning, blog post number one from July 2013 records the moment we picked up our first van. The fact I was able to do that shows that 'Heels for Dust' predates the moment we actually became motorhome owners. First a blog then the van, which is a bit arse about face when you think about it. In fact, I seem to remember creating the blog  as soon as we put the deposit down on Maisy, I did the the design, Gill came up with the name.  This was hardly the most obvious reaction to such a long anticipated event, perhaps cracking open a bottle of fizzy or joining a motorhome owners forum might have been a more normal response. 

What it reflects is just how important reading other people's blogs were during our transition from a settled life to a travelling one. Gill is an avid reader and as we drifted towards the end of our working  lives she added  motorhome blogs and self published 'van life' ebooks to the usual pile of novels she had on the go.

We learned two things from this blog fest. Firstly, although we aspired to buy a motorhome when we retired we had no clear plan of how we would use it, I suppose we imagined we would simply have more and longer holidays in sunny places. Blogs like 'Our Tour', 'Our Bumble' and Maggie Bevis' account of her travels through Greece made us realise that for many people motorhoming was not simply a pastime, it was more a way of life. They travelled freely for months at a time. It  gradually dawned on us that this was what we wanted too.

We gleaned practical information from the blogs as well. Buying your first motorhome is a daunting prospect, especially as for most of us it is the biggest purchase we will ever make apart from a house. The choice is bewildering, campervan or motorhome, A Class or coach-built; also to the first time buyer there seems to be an apparently infinite variety of ways to arrange a dining table, kitchen, bathroom and bed inside a van. What would suit us? The layout others chose to travel  long term helped us make the decision about what would be best for us - big enough not to feel claustrophobic if stuck inside due to bad weather, fixed rear double bed, big storage garage beneath -   both vans we have owned are 7m coach builds in this style. We got the decision right thanks to reading others' blogs.

For me there was an additional factor that made it  inevitable that I would want to keep a blog too. Gill is a voracious reader, me less so. Whereas Gill reads for pleasure I need to have a purpose to keep me hooked on a book, something that I am interested in or curious about. Consequently I tend to read more non-fiction than novels. However, I do write. From my teenage years onwards I scribbled for my own amusement, then over the past couple of decades as the internet brought together strangers with a shared interest, my writing reached a wider audience. I have never aspired to make a living from writing, but I am serious about it and have been published now and again and won a bit of prize money here and there, before I became disenchanted with the competitions because you end up writing for the the prize rather than just to please yourself.  I realise what I am about to say  sounds pretentious, but I honestly think it is true.  What makes the 'Heels for Dust' different, its USP if you like, is it the work of a writer who happens to travel by motorhome. Most other blogs are written by motorhomers who decide they want to write about it. Consequently, compared to most other motorhome blogs 'Heels for Dust' is of no practical use whatsoever. All the useful things I gleaned from others, about layouts, habitation systems, 'van life hacks', recommended campsites or particular interesting routes, make few appearances in 'Heels for Dust'. I write it purely for my own amusement, it's a personal journal that I choose to share.

At first, as the 'hit counter' notched up into the tens of thousands, I dismissed its tally of readers as  'Russian bots'. Indeed in the early days that did seem to be the case, the blogger dashboard identified Siberia as the major hotspot for avid readers. At some point, 2015 maybe, Google found a way of stemming the flood of spam emanating from Iratusk, a glitch that had be-devilled Blogger for years. As I expected with the bots blocked the hit counter slowed, but it didn't stop altogether, settling down to an average somewhat less than two thousand page reads per month. It felt gratifying to discover that people as well as robots were reading the blog, but I had no inkling of who they were.

By and large I still don't, but over the years a few people have taken the time to leave comments, mostly encouraging and  complimentary. Such as Steve, counting down the months to his retirement, starting 'Heels for Dust' at post one and worked through the entries consecutively to the latest one.This seemed a formidable task, for even back in 2017 the blog had grown longer than 'War and Peace' and lacked any of Tolstoy's  esteemed literary qualities other than seeming interminable. Nevertheless, it was touching to find our journey had inspired others even if it had been written purely as a personal record.

There's a memorable verse in Leonard Cohen's great song 'Famous Blue Raincoat' that goes something like this:

"I hear you are building your little house deep in the desert

You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record."

I've always loved the song ever since I first heard it in my late teens. Since retirement this particular verse has acquired an added resonance. Compared to a working life retirement can seem like 'living for nothing'. All those external imperatives that filled your middle age, family commitments, work responsibilities, the impossible competing demands on your time, all these things begin to evaporate. Added to that, for both of us our exit from work was messy and in my case a tad humiliating. Redundancy is never going to be a positive experience, the harsh truth of the matter is lodged within the term itself - surplus to requirements. So suddenly it does feel like you are faced with a future filled with nothing - a prospect simultaneously scary and empowering. Our way through it was to fill our lives with travel, and more than anything else this is the real story of Heels for Dust -  our record of living for nothing.

A slightly gnomic phrase appears in the song, "Did you ever go clear?" Cohen asks his fictional antagonist. Many words have been exchanged on-line about quite what this means. I find the most persuasive explanation is it reflects Cohen's brief dalliance with Scientology; to its adherents the phrase signifies a moment of becoming unclouded by the effects of conscious and unconscious trauma and deep seated anxieties. Obviously Scientology is a batshit crazy quasi-cult, but that does not mean absolutely everything about it is worthless. To me the idea of 'going clear' seems analogous to notions of 'non-attachment' found in many faiths, Buddhism' s 'nekkhamma,' or Zen's wú niàn" (無念), which literally means "no thought."  In the West, the Stoics' idea of 'apatheia' has similar connotations. 

What possibly does any of this somewhat esoteric stuff have to do with driving about for months on end in a van? I suppose for me the motorhome is my little house in the desert and I do 'go clear' when I travel. The sense of 'unbelonging' I get from being a stranger in a foreign land clears my mind. Back home, when I re-read some of my posts about our travels I find it difficult to recognise the person who wrote them; he seems full of curiosity, engaged in the moment, but still a detached observer. In short he appears much more sorted and less prone to negative rumination and nagging anxieties than the usual character that squats in my cranium. So as we sit here on Portsmouth docks heading to Santander tomorrow it seems a good moment to be celebrating day 1001 of our odyssey, not a begining nor an end point but a significant milestone on our way.

This being the case, as well as reflections about the past,  such moments invite speculation about the future. What are my chances of writing a post titled, '2001 - a van odyssey'? It's not out of the question, we would probably be in our mid 70s by that point. We entertained ourselves last week binge-watching Rick Stein's latest 15 part series about Cornwall. He's still active and switched on even though he is definitely a septuagenarian. Travelling long term does demand a basic level of health and fitness as well as having your wits about you. The older you are the less guaranteed that becomes. Yesterday, when we packed three months supply of prescription medicines for our various age related ailments we noted glumly that the pile seemed to be considerably bigger than last year. There is no point fretting about ageing, it's a classic Rumfeldian 'known unknown'. You know for certain at some point old age will catch-up with you and limit your active life, but you have little control as to when that will happen. 

Hmm, classic Pete negative rumination here!  What I do know is after a few days of wandering about under blue skies in our mobile 'little house' another version of me will begin to occupy my head. As the song says, I will 'go clear' heading inexorably towards day 2001 in expectation rather than merely in hope.