And so it began…
The 6th of March 2024 we started our journey on the road with our rooftop tent without a plan or timeframe. We decided to go travelling together and leave the Netherlands, we decided this during the last week of November 2023 so the transition was pretty quick. For the people that don’t know us, we first had the idea to live in a tiny house off grid in the Netherlands to go out of the big city and live more (in connection) with nature. That plan didn’t work out in the end because of the difficulty finding a plot of land to place our house so lastminute we had to change our plans. Our house was already basically for sale so we looked at each other what to do now and within an hour we felt and decided that we wanted to travel the world together and leave the Netherlands.
The preparations were busy and intense, leaving completely is not the easiest thing to do if you want to do it quick and so we had to arrange a lot of things in a very short time. But we love challenges and it felt like the right way to do so. From all the paperwork until selling and donating all our stuff and that all in divine timing was a rollercoaster. It was until the last days that a lot of work and energy had to go into the leaving part and the moment we actually drove out of the country we were exhausted and depleted. We were very eager to start our traveling, not only because we were very much looking forward to the adventure awaiting us but also because we were done with the rollercoaster of the preparations. Adding to this, Querijn also left his job as a teacher in the middle of this storm (21st of December) which also gave him a lot of extra work to transfer his tasks and obligations towards his colleagues and saying goodbye to everyone there. It was a hell of a ride…
When we left the country the weather was still quite chilly and rainy so it really was a fresh start. Which was, with the fact that we were heavy overloaded with stuff in our car and not having any routine in driving our car and using all the new equipment that we have bought, an intense experience too. It took us 1,5 weeks to travel towards a friend living in Valencia where we could re-organize our stuff and leave a part of it there. We stayed there for three weeks which was very needed to recover a bit from the intense period that we’ve had. We could skip the rest of the early spring weather there while sleeping in his house and had a new start to continue our travels towards Ibiza in the beginning of April. Ibiza was a chill continuation of our trip because it didn’t and couldn’t contain a lot of distant driving and we were meeting friends there, had nice camping weather and switched from rooftop tent to apartment and back. In the time we were staying in the apartment we had rainy weather so felt very grateful to be inside then. Most of the time that we slept in our rooftop tent we were experiencing mostly sunny and nice weather.
The switch from living in a city in the Netherlands to road tripping is a big difference and we felt that of course. Needing the time to get used to this way of living and destressing from the period before takes time and space. Therefore, we hadn’t had a lot of contact with our family and friends and really needed space to get used to all of this.
This is why only now we started feeling the space to start writing blogposts like these, where we expand a bit on our processes. We fully intend to catch up the blogposts with our travelling so stay tuned for more. In the meantime you can always check us out on Instagram.