My name is Aelita. I’m 39, originally from Lithuania. I moved to the UK at 21, met my husband Tomas at 22, and we spent about twelve years there before we traded our home for van life.
Before that, we had a completely normal life. Corporate jobs, a house, and weekends that we lived for. Every summer, we’d drive to Portland in Dorset, pitch a tent, and spend the week rock climbing. We loved it. We just didn’t love the rest of the year as much as that one week.
Then came the NC500. Two of us, our dog Summer, a Nissan, and fourteen days driving across the north of Scotland – sleeping in the car, cooking on a camp stove and not once feeling like we were missing anything. We came back having realised we were fine with a lot less than we thought. We didn’t know it at the time, but that trip changed something in us.
A couple of years later, on a climbing holiday in Spain, we met people who were living on the road full-time. We’d never heard of van life before. Seeing it in person made it feel not just possible but obvious, so we spent the next few years making sure we could do it properly: not save up for a year and come home, but actually do it – remote jobs, no fixed end date, no plan for how long.
When we started planning van life back in 2017, there was almost nothing to read about any of it. No one was really showing what van life costs long term, or whether it’s safe to travel across Europe as a couple, or whether any of this is even sustainable past the first year. We were in our thirties, and we had no idea if we’d last six months. We just had the people we’d met in Spain, the memory of the NC500, and the feeling that it was worth finding out. So we did.
Four years in, we’ve covered 13+ countries, spent 365 days a year outdoors, and I’ve hiked, rock climbed, done via ferrata, paddled, and camped in conditions I wouldn’t have believed manageable when we started. We both still work, the van is just where we live now, usually parked near a trail, often somewhere with questionable wifi, always somewhere worth being.
I started this blog because I wanted to write about all of it honestly. Not the version that looks good in a grid. Not tips from someone who did their first overnight hike last spring. Just what it looks like when you leave a normal life in your late thirties and figure it out as you go – the good days, the bad campsites, the climbs that humbled me, and the ones that didn’t.
If you found this and you’re wondering whether any of this is possible without being 24, yes. That’s the whole point of my blog – to help you get there.
You can also stay in touch with me on YouTube and Instagram.
