10.01.2020 Travel including downsides

The next blog post, we will tell you what we experience. We will show you the beautiful places we see and the photos we were able to take. Traveling is really fun. You are free, flexible, and decide for yourself when and where you stay. The typical van life includes cuddly blankets and occasionally even glimpses of the sea when you wake up.

Yes, traveling is fun, but have you ever thought about how exhausting it can be? No? We will explain why.

A typical day for us at the moment? When we have landed at a 'good' campground, we can sleep as long as we want and may also be lucky with the weather. On the other hand, you can have the misfortune, as we have a few times, that you have to leave the campground already at 7:30 in the morning, that's what some signs say here. Anyway, we just stay longer, right? What can happen? Well, here you simply get a $200 fine. You even get that here if you are just a little over a line.

Since we - (good) Germans... always obey everything, we have not received a fine so far.

Let's continue with the daily routine. Let's assume you don't have to leave the place early, so you have a nice breakfast, right? And how is it without a refrigerator, electricity, or a proper kitchen?

We are lucky that in our van we can also cook inside if the weather doesn't cooperate. Most people here always cook inside, but do you want to sleep with this humidity in the 'bedroom'?

Without a refrigerator and running electricity, you can come up with many things. There are already solar panels for the car, with which you can, for example, run a cool box. We don't have something like that, and we don't need it either. At most, we have bread with honey, Nutella, or eggs. Sometimes pancakes. So if you don't have a way to cool something down, say goodbye to your beloved cold cuts for bread.

After breakfast, you always continue driving. We have rarely had a campground where we wanted to stay for more than one night because either the rain poured down like buckets, the wind shook our car like a boat, or the sun was too aggressive, and there was no shade. So let's move on to the next point, you can't escape the weather, sure, you can convert our van so that we can sit inside, but after days of continuous rain, it's not for everyone either. In extreme sun, such a car also heats up quickly. Even on a perfect day with sunshine, you should be aware that you will have high temperatures inside the car even with the door open, and in such a car, there is, of course, only limited space.

Especially when you think about the toilet situation. Going to the toilet in pouring rain, yayy. Or where can I find the nearest public toilet? We do have a camping toilet, but who wants to use that? Who does their business where they sleep, in the car?

Alright, so you drive almost every day and see great things, that's nice, but as mentioned, it is actually exhausting in the long run. There is unfortunately not much time to consciously perceive and process all these impressions. We are talking about a luxury problem, but at some point, the 100th waterfall is just another waterfall or the 100th beach is just another beach.

We have rarely slept well at night, parked close together, the sliding doors of the neighbors banging open and closed a thousand times during the night, the rain sounding like stones on the roof, or the loud wind, as there has been no normal weather for us in New Zealand so far. The weather here has always been extreme for us. Extremely rainy, extremely windy, snow, ice, and extreme heat. At the moment, we finally have a few weeks of more stable weather, and we really enjoy that.

We often get jealous when we tell people that we have sunshine and around 20 degrees and it is winter at home. But when it was summer at home, we have had the worst weather ever :-D.

I am digressing, let's get back to the daily routine. So you go from highlight to highlight and have to find your sleeping place again in the evening, but you are not the only ones doing that here. In some cases, we have to be at the campground as early as 3:00 p.m. because otherwise, it is already full. One day we drove from 4:00 p.m. until almost 8:00 p.m. just to find a sleeping place.

If you have become too accustomed to Netflix and Co. at home, say goodbye to it before you start a van journey because Wi-Fi is a rare commodity.

We often go to McDonald's to get free Wi-Fi when necessary.

Now let's talk about showers and laundry. With certain apps, we can search for showers in the area, which are either cold or warm. Warm showers usually cost around $2-7 for 4-8 minutes of hot water. Doing laundry is, of course, not as convenient as at home. We have to plan a lot of time for it and go to a laundromat. It costs us about $10 to do one load of laundry.

You can also refill water at public places, but you also have to look them up and plan time for that. It already sounds stressful if you haven't slept well one day, have to do a lot of things (laundry, refilling water, finding a shower, shopping), and then have to find a sleeping place while you want to see something and have to be back at the campground at 3:00 p.m.

Despite these 'downsides' that we wanted to bring closer to you, we love the way we are currently traveling. And if you are too tired to drive every day, you just have to deliberately look for a place where you can stay longer. And if the weather doesn't cooperate and you long for a 'base' like a home, just go to a hostel or a hotel. But we're not interested in that.

Don't think that we don't enjoy all of this, we just wanted to show that it's not always good. There are also disadvantages.

The freedom and flexibility are what we love the most. We also love coming up with new cooking ideas because we don't have anything to keep things cold.

We love having only the bare minimum with us. We don't need more than our backpack, and we love that our 'house' is always with us and goes everywhere with us. Just open the sliding door in the evening and jump into our little bed and just go out in the morning and continue. Being able to stop at a park somewhere, take a break, and prepare lunch because the kitchen is always with us. No need to pack a big bag before going on an excursion, and we just stay wherever we like.

Often, we simply make the best out of not-so-nice campgrounds, sit on the beach with blankets all day, go fishing, take a day off.

Traveling doesn't have to be exhausting, but it can be.