At the recent (September 2016) 10 year reunion of my MBA class in Oxford, I was asked to give a “TED-style” talk about our trip. I’ve turned the slides and the script I used into a PDF document to share it here.
Category Archives: About
Living in a Yellow Van: A TED-style talk given to the reunion of my MBA class
A year in the van in review
A year ago today, the van was pushed out of it’s shipping container, given a push start by a fork-lift truck and then made it’s first journey on South American soil straight to the nearest VW garage! A year later, these 12 pictures are our highlights of our first year on the road in Latin America, along with some reflections…. Continue reading
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About the Yellow Van part 1: Sourcing & Preparing
Picking the van up from Hastings
While preparing for the trip, and since arriving in South America, we’ve had a number of questions about our van: why did we ship a vehicle for our trip out from the UK rather than get one out here; why a van; what have we done to prepare it for the trip etc.? So this post is a description of how we sourced and prepared the Yellow Van and the subsequent one is about fitting it out ready.
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About the Yellow Van part 2: Fitting & Kitting
At ActionVan’s workshop – partway through fit out
By June 2014, we had a vehicle that met our specs and was ready to convert into a simple camper van to be our home for the trip. Given that we were planning to be away for so long, we wanted something that had the potential to feel like a home, as well as be practical for long term living.
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“We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us” – unknown
We are Bruce & Rebecca and The Yellow Van. We had been married for 15 years, living ordinary professional couple lives, but, for the last 10 of which, we had cultivated a dream (frequently feeding it with good bottles of wine) to take time out for an epic road-trip. In the summer of 2014, we turned the dream into reality, giving up our “good” jobs, getting rid of most of our accumulated stuff (putting the rest in storage), renting out our house in Oxford and moving into our converted yellow VW T4 – “The Yellow Van”. In October 2014 we shipped the van from London to Montevideo, Uruguay, for the start of our overland adventure in Latin America. You can see where we’ve been on our route map page and read our postcards home, accompanied by lots of photos. There are more frequently posted Facebook updates here. We are also doing occasional blogs on some themes of the trip (such as wine tasting, rock climbing, …) under the heading topics. Having been all the way south to “the end of the world” (Tierra del Fuego) and on to Antarctica, our original idea was to drive all the way to Mexico, but we slowed down as we travelled and took our time to enjoy what we were seeing and experiencing. Over time, it became less about going somewhere and more about being somewhere. So we finished our driving trip with a long exploration of Colombia and returned to the UK from Cartagena in January 2017. The picture above was taken in front of the Torres del Paine in the far south of Chile in January 2015.
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Yellow Van Days 