My girlfriend Theresa has a van that we’ve worked on for a while and that is now in a state we are using it for trips away. It has far more bells and whistles than mine and even room to stand up.

Nicer in so many ways but I am going to miss the nights in my little, simple, no frills van. It’s life is far from over though it won’t get used on trips away quite as much as it has until now.

I’ve spent hundreds of nights in it since I bought it back in the early days of 2020, when my Dad and I went to get it from a couple of hours East down the M4. It was just an empty van back then that had been owned by Network Rail, I’m sure with a fairly mundane life around the railways of South Wales.

I didn’t know what I was buying really but for years and years prior I had wanted a van, I wanted my own place to stay anywhere I could drive it, somewhere I could pack my bike and my climbing gear and head off wherever I fancied. Though thinking about it maybe it wasn’t a van I wanted but the freedom to go further than the isolated corner of Wales where I grew up, a stepping stone to the larger world. A way to grow maybe.

I bought this one without too much thought, it was one of the first we looked at and it seemed to tick all the boxes it needed to tick. Really though I think I lucked out, it was just the van I needed, just the right size to carry young me and my adventurous dreams. That’s what it did.

My van to me felt like a shell to a snail.

A home I could carry wherever I went.

One I could curl up inside and feel somewhat safe wherever I was.

It’s still there and still is my shell. My friends joke that I have everything you could ever need hidden in there somewhere. “I’ve got one in my van” I answer so frequently to their needs when we’re out and about.

I’m a different Jacob now to who I was six or so years ago when I bought this van. I'm more grown up now and no longer living in my parents house with that burning desire to be elsewhere that I guess all young people have at some point. My life doesn’t have that same need for a stepping stone to freedom that it did six or so years ago.

Where would I be if it wasn’t for this van?

Who would I be if it wasn’t for this van?

The inside of the van is very simple, though it started off even simpler. Just a bed that pulls out and a space for my bike in the back. I had a two burner stove and a jerry can of water, with other bits stuffed in boxes under the bed.

I changed a few bits over the years, but mostly it’s just like it was at the start. The stove moved from sitting on a terribly designed table I’d built at the front to a worktop and cupboard at the side. The original I knocked off one time as I got into the van, lucky to only spill a little of the hot contents of the pan on myself and luckier still not to set the whole thing on fire. I added a nice storage shelf in the front and a leisure battery tucked under the bed too.

I didn’t need any more.

There’s not much more to need.

Though there were a few nights I remember where I woke in the morning to find my water bottle frozen, too cold to leave the haven of the duvet. Where I’d be tucked in bed from when the sun went down until it returned the next morning. A heater might have been nice at that point.

I remember being parked up with groups of others in their vans too, at the beaches local to home, in the mountains up in North Wales, the weeks I spent in the forest in Fontainebleau among many. Just days spent being. Climbing, biking, trying to surf, hiking up mountains and looking down at the world below.

I haven’t stopped, that’s still what I aim to do with many of my days.

The way it happens now is different.

I’m not the same so it shouldn’t be the same.

Whichever van we use to travel into the future simply serves a purpose, a tool to enable the living of life.

Jacob.