I'm a writer, and I love writing, about short little snippets of our lives and our love for travelling. Ben loves writing too, but he also works incredibly hard and so he doesn't have a lot of time for writing. So I wanted to write something for him.
Ben is honest, and smart, and observes things about people most wouldn't notice. He loves swimming in the sea and he used to have dreadlocks down to his chest. He's level-headed and extremely good at speaking about politics, and he once disarmed someone with a knife.
He also loves travelling, maybe more than I do. When he was 18 he went travelling around India for four months with just a backpack and the money he'd earned from working night shifts, simply because he likes curry. When he was 21 he took himself off backpacking around Eastern Europe for a whole summer by himself, staying in hostels and hiking mountains and camping with Roma gypsies.
He fits into the minimalistic lifestyle better than I ever could, and all his friends know him as "Ben with the van".
While I get too comfortable in a place, he's always ready to move on, to explore, adventure. Out of us two I'm the trouble-maker and he's the impressionable one, the one who ends up reversing two miles down a forest track I told him to drive down when we get caught by rangers. Or the one who does the explaining when we get caught climbing into an abandoned building.
Most of all he's a traveller through and through; his home belongs on wheels, or stuffed into a backpack on his back. He never drifts aimlessly like a feather in the breeze, but glides purposefully toward his destination like a crow. And if you gave him the choice, he'd rather wander afar with nothing but the boots on his feet and the coat on his back, than settle in one spot and be confined between four white-washed walls.
#Follow the hashtag #Fromrusttoroadtrip to follow our van conversion project and our travels around Europe! 🌍
