How to Travel France in a Van
How do we travel France in a Van?
So, the other day I was sitting in my house in Normandy and it hit me. I live in France! France!!! Ok, I moved here in 2016 and it’s not like I woke up one day and realized that I was here. It’s a story, for sure and here it is in a nutshell.
I came to France when I was 18, spent a year living with a wonderful family, met a young man and had an adventure and went back home to Canada heartbroken. As an 18-year-old, of course it was very dramatic. Fast forward 30 years later and said Frenchman contacted me, we saw each other, fell back in love and I moved to France in 2016, we got married and voila. I am now living in France as a Canadian/Czech citizen.
Where are we travelling to in France?
For now we have decided to travel around France, then possibly, if we haven’t killed each other by then over a stray sock on the floor, we may travel into Spain, Portugal and maybe even Morocco.
As of writing this, it’s Wednesday October 20th, 2022 and we have officially been on the road for a month. We left our town in Normandy on September 20th, 2022 after shutting the house down, turning off the water and electricity and leaving the house to be watched over by my amazingly kind step-son.
So far we have travelled down through the massif central, into Auvergne, Gap, Cote Du Rhone and have arrived on the Mediterranean coast. We even had a dip in the ocean at 7pm and it was glorious, no tourists and only a couple of irritating Asian hornets who, like nasty gang members, circled around us to see if there was anything to steal.
I find it interesting when we talk to people along the way. The first questions are always, where are you going and how long will you be away? Normal questions given that the majority of people we know work for a living and have limited holidays. We don’t know how long we’ll be away. We might decide in two weeks we’ve had enough, but I doubt it. We both want to keep going so it’ll last as long as it lasts. I’m fine not knowing.
How do you afford to travel and still own a house?
We are not wealthy people and my husband’s pension is pretty modest for a retired civil servant. I work as a language teacher and freelance writer for an online teaching platform, although work has been scarse of late and it would be perfect for working on the road as I wouldn’t need an internet connection everyday.
Once the government of France takes their cut in social charges for my current teaching work, I end up with less than 150€/month before taxes. Clearly I need to work more and while offers are coming in, it’s kind of hard to work more and expect to consider that this is an extended holiday.
We would have to find a place to stay for several days with good internet connection and consecrate that time to me working. On this trip it’s not really working out that way. That’s part of the reason I am starting my blog as I hope one day to create posts with affiliate links that could earn me some relatively passive income. For now, though, I am just writing articles and hoping to learn the ropes of blogging while I build an audience.
Living debt free
All said, my husband and I have zero debt and no credit cards. It took me five years to pay off a massive debt carried over from my former life in Canada, but it’s done and I vow never again to live a deficit financed lifestyle.
The house is paid for and we live within our means because we have no other choice. We don’t have investments, our savings account is very small and we literally have no other income other than my husband’s pension and the little work I’ve gotten over the past few years.
So how do you travel and still live a decent life?
We rarely, if ever, eat in restaurants and we wild camp, meaning that we find places to sleep for free. We avoid buying souvenirs and our activities center around going for hikes and walks around cute villages. We have also planned our route so that we can drop in on friends around the country.
We are lucky to have friends who allow us to take hot showers, do laundry, fill up our water tank and even let us sleep in the house if they have the space. It’s such a comfort and makes travelling more comfortable. Still, It’s nice to arrive, visit and replenish but it’s also exciting to say au revoir and be on our way again.
We cannot afford visits to every tantalising cultural place we would like to visit. Entry fees are ridiculously high and you have to consider parking and where you’re going to stay after you’re done visiting a place. We end up having to shrug our shoulders a lot and uttering “tant pis” (too bad) and just go on to the next place.
How to make fuel go farther
As I write this, the price of diesel for the van is anywhere from €1.80-2.10/litre which is atrocious, literally doubling the price of a tankful of diesel from when we were considering our trip. That hurts and cuts even further into our available expenditures.
There have been strikes and sometimes we think we are going to fill up and arrive at a station that is closed because they have no more gas or diesel. As a result, we try to fill up the tank when it’s still half full and spend considerable time looking for stations with the best prices. More often than not we have to accept a higher price for fear of not having enough diesel to continue only to pass through a town that has prices 10 centimes less than what we just paid. That really hurts!
Drive slower
If you want to maximize fuel efficiency, drive slower. Period, end of story. Driven normally, meaning at the speed limit or even just above, the van gets fuel consumption is around 10 litres/100km. On this trip, we’ve taken it so slow that the best consumption we’ve gotten has been 7.8 litres/100 km, which is the first time in the history of owning his truck that we’ve gotten such amazing results.
Part of the reason is that we do not take the autoroutes because we don’t want to pay tolls. We take national or departmental roads and we take our time.Slow travel also means we see more of the countryside and discover some unusual and sometimes crappy roads and villages that we would never see if we just zoomed from point to point on the autoroute.
Anticipate and don’t brake like a maniac
One other thing that really bugs my husband is how often people here tailgate, then gun it to pass us only to then brake like an idiot 50 metres in front of us at the next corner. This is really bad for fuel consumption and terrible for the brakes. Anticipating corners, lights, gearing to slow down and avoiding knee jerk driving is just plain sensible, and generally nicer for everyone involved.
What we live on
I want my readers to understand that on less than 2,000€/month, we manage to travel in the van and still meet our financial obligations for bills at home. Not only that but we bought firewood and fuel for the furnace before we left home, meaning that if we decide to go home during the winter, we will be able to warm the house.
It’s important to have a few treats
The truth of the matter is that we have to live simply and within a tight budget but it’s also important in life to have a few little treats here and there. For us that means a cold beer on a terrace after a long hike, the ocassional espresso in a cafe and sometimes I buy a nice little pasty for dessert, a bag of pistachios for happy hour, and sometimes I buy a bar of dark chocolate on the sly and tuck it into my art supply bag and while my husband is out smoking his guts outside, I sneak a piece of chocolate. I mean seriously, he smokes, I eat chocolate. I’d call that fair.
We shop in supermarkets and watch pricing while still picking healthy foods. We keep a small selection of canned foods, sometimes some lovely things like confit de canard, but we try to buy mostly fresh foods. That’s a bit complicated though because some things go bad more quickly than if we were at home so we have had to fine tune the kinds of fresh vegetables and meats we buy so we don’t end up wasting food.
What kind of campervan do you have?
We have a 2001 Iveco van that my husband converted into a camper and also recently updated to comply with newly invented laws around what constitutes a legal van conversion. It was paid for a long time ago but with the new rules we had to invest around 1,400€ just for some ridiculous upgrades that we imediately removed once the van was approved as a “camping car.” In short, that whole story is a bloody nightmare designed to get more people to buy new campervans on credit.
What about all those YouTubers?
When I watch YouTube videos of people living in their vans and wild camping, the cynic in me asked whether they do it for real or if they park in a spot and pretend to camp, taking videos and such only to head to the local campground? I have no idea.
The thing about social media is that people can make up all kinds of stories and many of the stories aren’t necessarily the whole truth. One young girl I follow on YouTube travels fulltime in her van, her parents do as well and given her huge number of subscribers and views, she must be making a killing. Does she really park in weird spots for a night and every night or does she spend 90% of her time in a campground? She can certainly afford it. I can’t know for sure but I sure as heck hope she’s legit, cuz she’s cute as a button and I’m totally in love with the way she presents herself.
Alas, travelling by van and living with another human within a 6 metre long tincan be lovely but other times it’s just plain hard and I want to whack him over the head with a stale baguette. God knows what he wants to do to me when I won’t put up with his ridiculous moods. What I know for sure is that we are just getting started and hopefully, we will come out the other end with experiences that build connection, and memories that will keep the fires lit in the dark times.
Bisous a tous et a bientot.
