Our second home on wheels: Rose
Van number 2 was a really special one, and also unexpected! We sold our first camper ‘Gracie’ for multiple reasons Learn more about Gracie here.
- Only had 2 seats (My wife was pregnant
- Was UK Registered, with Brexit everything was becoming more difficult to spend longer in the rest of Europe.
- Did we want to do vanlife with a newborn…
But with COVID came many things that we didn’t expect, one of which was Rose… We couldn’t travel, fly anywhere or do anything really. We had our 2 month year old and were looking at options and with no signs of international travel opening up anytime soon we ended up coming back round the idea of another van, that idea for me immediately became concrete when I came across ‘Rose’.
When we got her, Rose was a bit of a mess. half finished and already starting to fall apart and rust away again.
With a 2 month old baby, this was a challenge for sure, but I saw the potential in Rose, maybe more than most. But it was a bigger van, filled with character and actually a blank canvas (once we had stripped her out).
Mechanically she just needed a good service, new tires all round and a little bit of love after sitting for so long. But everything else was pretty daunting.
But somehow we found a way to keep working on her, raise our little one, make videos, make money and after almost 1 year we were ready to hit the road.
The best thing about having a blank canvas was creating everything exactly as we wanted. We knew from our first camper that we wanted more power, more water storage, more space! However, vanlife as a couple vs vanlife as a family was very different, and not something we really understood till we started living in Rose.
We cracked on completely reforming the inside and out, and soon the name ‘Rose’ was born from the color we found.
With the outside complete and protected we had to rush to finish the inside so we could move in and get back on the road.
It was already moving into winter, the weather in Mallorca was starting to get colder and wetter and we had plans to get back over to the mainland and head south.
But with the winter moving in faster than we wanted, we decided to move in without a bathroom or shower, just a toilet! And lots of other unfinished little jobs, but we wanted to chase the sun again.
So with an almost finished van we headed to the mainland, and as fast as our 60kph top speed would allow us, we headed south. Realizing it was too cold and wet still in most of the south of Spain and Portugal we had a choice of Morocco or Canaries, and with Morocco still facing travel restrictions, we finally got to go and see what the Canaries would be like!
And that’s it for the intro to Rose – Check back for more updates on Rose, what systems we ended up with, how it worked for us and many other posts about what it was like living in a 50+ year old camper.
Hi, I’m Luke.
I’ve personally renovated three camper vans from the ground up, including complete electrical systems, plumbing, solar, networking and smart automation.
This website documents my latest project: building one of Europe’s most advanced smart camper vans.
Are you looking to build your own ‘Smart Van’? If you need help, get in touch.
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