When I was a teenager as a family we used to go on holidays to the coast during which I would try and learn to surf. I can clearly remember dreaming of owning a Kombi one day and using it to travel along the coast to surf and live in.
In my early twenties I was heavily into climbing and spent many a weekend at the “Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, a climbing crag in Mpumalanga which gets it’s name from A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. At that stage I was burning the candle at both ends, working, studying part-time and climbing and the dream of owning a Kombi to live and travel in still remained just now it had shifted to be a means to be a climbing bum. At this time, it was common for people to be doing this in the USA, possibly what was the beginning of Van Life, a currently popular term for people working remotely and travelling while living in a van of sorts.
Of course, life in general took over and so followed a good few years of working and developing a career interspersed with holidays including climbing trips to Kenya, New Zealand, Bolivia and Greece.
Very early in our relationship Tania & I bought Mr. Jones and after an initial quick kit out we took him off to Central Kalahari along with our son Devon for our first extended family holiday together. Our next trip was to Mozambique and it was during this that we began to scheme that if Devon took a gap year when he finished school then so could we, especially seeing as both Devon and Mr Jones would be 18 years old.
A couple of years later the idea developed from a gap year into a gap decade as the reality was that despite having good careers, a lovely house and many material assets both us could not escape the wanderlust deep within ourselves.
12 years later and 35 years after dreaming of being a surf bum it is all falling into place.