The thing about van life is that there’s always a job to do if you want to avoid descending into chaos. All the usual home chores like washing up, laundry and cleaning still have to be completed. In a cramped space, with none of the right equipment. It’s like playing in a toy kitchen at nursery school.

Today, we were living the domestic dream washing, tidying and sorting. It’s all glamour this van life. We spent the morning reclaiming the van. It looked like there had been a controlled explosion under the storage boxes and the van appears to have eaten up all of my socks. Calm has been restored, for the moment at least.

Gas guesstimates

We’re heading to Budapest next- but after that we’re in the van for at least ten days, travelling across Romania and Bulgaria, much of it in smaller towns. Nothing is booked <shudder> and we don’t have a clear understanding of what we can buy and what facilities to expect. So, instead of embracing our usual policy of lighting the gas and hoping for the best, we used a more scientific approach. We weighed the canister with a luggage-pulley-thingy and then referred to a graph to get the gas content. It came to 60%, which is bizarre considering we’ve used it for most of last summer- but what could possibly go wrong? ( I won’t mention my mathematical blip in Karlovy Vary when I got my exchange rates out by a factor of ten, and ended up paying £100 instead of £10 for my facial!) It may well be salads all the way for the next week or so.

Next stop Budapest where I went on my very last trip abroad before the pandemic. I loved the city then and can’t wait to share it with Mr G.