The Shakedown Trip
Everything that could rattle, rattled. We wouldn't change a thing.
The first night in the van, properly in the van, with no house to retreat to, we lay there listening to a cupboard door we’d hung slightly wrong tap-tapping against its frame in the wind. Neither of us said anything for a bit. Then we both started laughing, because what else do you do.
Out of the driveway, into the deep end
You can plan a van conversion for a year. You can measure twice and cut once and read every forum thread ever written about leisure batteries. And then you take it out for real and discover that the thing you forgot was a hook for the tea towels, and that the fridge sounds like a small angry robot at 2am.
The Peak District was the obvious place for a shakedown, close enough to home that a catastrophe was recoverable, wild enough to feel like the real thing. We gave ourselves four days to find out what we’d got wrong.
What we’d got wrong
Plenty, as it turns out. The aforementioned cupboard. A water pump that cut out whenever we went round a left-hand bend. A camera bag stowed somewhere so clever that it took twenty minutes and most of our patience to locate it before a sunrise.
But the bones were good. The bed was warm, the stove lit first time, and the coffee the next morning, watching the mist lift off the hills through the back doors, tasted like the start of something.
Onward
We’re writing this with the van packed again and the Channel tunnel booked. The cupboard’s fixed. The water pump is a work in progress. The tea towels have a hook.
Next stop: properly away.