This year has been great in terms of work but in terms of doing our own projects not so great.😅 We haven’t got half the projects done but we are not planning to give up! We still can’t work on our own projects full-time or even half-time, nevertheless we finally started preparing for the winter trip. Sure, small things that would have taken a day or two to complete, take us at least a week to finish. We are doing some changes/ repairs to the bus a little bit at a time, taking a few hours here and there, but we have no other choice.

We’ve spent on Gotland way longer time than we could have imagined and it’s been really hard mentally to be back. And the way things look like now, we will probably have to spend at least another half a year here next year. If we are lucky.

So decided to take a break from Gotland and go somewhere where’s snow! Wish us luck. It is going to be a long month and a half for us!☃ But we can’t wait to be back on the road again!

Meet Lou, our new family and crew member!☺️ He is a part parrot and a pine cone lover, he is a traveler from the start. He was born in a home of a fellow vanlifer in Krasnodar region in Russia, he got to explore St Petersburg with his auntie waiting for his transportation to Sweden and now here he is!🥳

A big thank you to everyone involved and who has made it possible for us to meet this little guy even though Swedish-Russian borders are still closed!

We would have picked him up ourselves, but current situation in the world made it impossible. After many hours of planning and re-planning the best possible way for his transportation we were finally able to bring him home! Our days got much brighter with Lou’s arrival.😊

We are happy to let you know that our webshop is finally open!🥳🎉✨ We’ve been working on it for a while but due to lack of time, sometimes inspiration (and perfectionism 😅) we kept postponing the release date so many times!

But now it finally feels like we turn this page over and move on with our list of ideas. Right now in our webshop you can find our first ever stickers and enamel mugs with our won designs, but in the future we are planning to add more products like presets, textile bags, hopefully even some camping gear that we like. :) The list of ideas is endless and we are very excited to start working on it! 😄

Everything in the shop is on sale now! So if you are thinking of getting a nice enamel mug for camping or would like to support us by getting our first ever sticker pack, please, consider checking our webshop out.😊

Hi guys! It is time to show you one of two big projects we are planning on realizing before leaving Gotland. Meet the newest addition to our travel family! We actually purchased it almost a year ago, but only now we have a possibility to start working on this awesome project. And we couldn’t be more excited! It’s an old military truck Volvo Laplander L3314 from 1963. Our plan is to restore it to its former glory and convert it to a mini off-road camper. The idea behind it is to rent it out during summers here on Gotland, since Gotland is a very popular tourist attraction in Sweden. And one day in the future we are hoping to ship it to Iceland and explore the country for a couple of months in this little off-road camper. We are planning to share the whole restoration/conversion process on our YT channel. Don’t forget to subscribe, so you don’t miss our new conversion series!

One of our goals this year is to continue working on our YouTube channel and post new videos every week. We really hope to grow our channel by the end of this year before we start traveling again. It would really mean a lot, if you could check out our videos. Click on the image to visit our channel. If you like our content, please like and subscribe! It really helps us a lot! Every single subscriber, like or comment helps us to grow and motivates us to make better content! And thank you everyone for your support!🤗

We were hesitant about going to the mainland during winter holidays. It would be our first time living in the bus without Balthazar since he passed. His place in the bus looked so empty and was a constant reminder of his absence. But it was our only chance to get away from Gotland and remind ourselves once more what we are working for and how it is to be free, surrounded by beautiful nature. We took about a month long trip to Winter Wonderland. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much snow in my entire life. And in the end, we were actually glad we left and took some time for ourselves. It was so beautiful, we didn’t want to leave, but there’s no rest for the wicked. We came back to Gotland in January to continue working on our projects.
We made a video about our winter van life experience that you can watch on our YouTube channel. Click on the image, if you’d like to check it out.

This is the hardest update we've ever had to make. We are very sad to let you know that our beloved Balthazar is no longer with us. Balthazar’s big heart could not go on anymore. We are absolutely devastated and heartbroken. I brought myself to write this update almost four months later and I still cannot believe that he is gone. It took us a while to come back from this huge loss and start working again and we still think about him and miss him every single day. He was such a huge part of our lives. He took a part of our souls with him and left a big hole in our hearts. With this post we thank you our beautiful Balthazar for all the wonderful memories and for making us better persons. We will miss you for the rest of our lives.

We took a short autumn trip to the Swedish mainland mostly to take a break from Gotland, to gather our thoughts and to remind ourselves what it is all about once again. But in the end of our trip our dearest Balthazar fell very ill. He was very sick, we almost lost him. Balthazar was diagnozed with acute pancreatitis. But after a whole week at Östersunds Djursjukhus, thanks to their outstanding care, Balthazar got better. We are so thrilled to have him back with us and we are so grateful that we got some more time to spend with him. He is getting old and we are very worried about him, so we came back to Gotland as soon as he got better. We are planning to spend a few more months on Gotland to finish off some work and now also to be able to give Balthazar some stability and make sure he is completely healthy before we start traveling again.

Right now we have many decisions to make and a couple of very important things to take care of, like, for example, helping Björn’s father to finish building his apartment, since he can’t work by himself anymore. Which means that we’ll be staying on Gotland for a while longer.
Some people are predicting a second wave of coronavirus this autumn. So, who knows, maybe it’s for the best that we are stuck here. We are lucky to be healthy and be able to continue working on our projects. This year has been tough for the whole world and probably ruined so many people’s plans. So we shouldn’t complain.
We’ll be trying to use this time to finish all our projects, to hopefully get more stable income on the road, and finally open our webshop and maybe even to make a few changes to the bus and so on and so forth. So, when the time to hit the road comes, we can feel that we’ve done everything we could to use this time to our advantage.
We are still learning to be present and live in the moment. Maybe this time is a lesson for us so we can finally learn to live in the now and not forget about life and pursuing our goals. One thing is for sure - no matter where we are based this autumn-winter, this Christmas we are planning to celebrate on the mainland somewhere in a snowy and frosty forest surrounded by winter wonderland.

In the end of November 2019 we had to come back to Gotland due to family matters. And in a way we were lucky to be back and have a place to stay, when Covid-19 pandemic started unfolding in the world.
Björn’s father was supposed to have a surgery in the beginning of this year, but it got postponed until summer because of the pandemic.
Meanwhile more and more countries started closing their boarders, so we decided to go back to our former jobs for a while and focus on getting all our affairs in order. So we could leave as soon as Björn’s father was well and travelling was possible again.
After all, when we moved in to the bus in the summer of 2019, we were planning to go to the mainland, rest for a month or so and then go back to Gotland to finish off some stuff, like installing warm water in the bus or connecting electricity to our storage with all our belongings (that we decided to keep after the house sale). But we didn’t come back that summer. We realized pretty soon that we needed more time to recuperate and to spend away from the island. So this forced return was good for us in a way, because now when we are rested, we can focus on everything that we still have left to do here. But we wish to be able to leave sooner rather than later, of course.

We found out that Björn’s father was having a serious surgery in the beginning of November 2019. In the end of the month the doctors said that the surgery was going to be done very soon but they couldn’t tell us the exact date yet, so we rushed back to Gotland. The road back was hard. I remeber how it was always dark, because days get pretty short in the North in winter. It was very cold, we had trouble starting our old diesel engine in -26° C. We drove many hours per day without proper heat in the cabin to return to Gotland as soon as possible. We didn’t know then that we would have to spend many long months on Gotland again and that many countries would go into total lockdown because of coronavirus.
In a way it was nice to come back to much milder weather and longer days on Gotland, to live in a cosy cabin for a while, but our hearts stayed in that crispy white landscape that we were hoping so much to experience and were waiting for the whole autumn.

Over half a year, July-the end of November 2019, we spent above the Arctic Circle in Sweden and Norway. Our plan was to visit as many countries in Europe, but the northern regions of Scandinavia are so beautiful, that we got stuck there for whole 7 months until we had to return to Gotland due to some family matters.
It took us very long time to feel well and rested again. It even took us a few months to “learn how to travel”. But we wouldn’t be where we are mentally or emotionally now, if we didn’t make that decision to leave last year.

We moved in to the bus in the spring of 2019. We were still working on it and staying at Björn’s father’s property from time to time to regroup. It took another 2-3 months before all the essentials like running watrer and gas, Balthazar’s food table and etc were fixed, and we felt like we could finally leave at least for a while to get some rest after over a year of everyday work. We were completely exhausted, the work was going very slowly and we felt very unproductive. It was a vicious circle - we needed a break, even meeting friends became hard, keeping a regular conversation with other people was a struggle; but we thought that we had to continue working because we wanted to be 100% done with everything before we started travelling. It got to a point when we weren’t doing any good job on the bus anymore. We just felt desperate and completely miserable, becuse it felt like the departure date moved forward every day instead of moving up. So we one evening we booked a ticket to the mainland and without making any futher plans than just getting there and deciding where to camp for the night, we left. And this is how our journey to the Arctic Circle in Sweden and Noray began in July 2019. And this decision was the best decision we ever made. There’s always something to do, to fix or improve. It very is important to know when to stop and take a break. After all, it is all about the journey, the process and not about the result. We live now, we live every day, and it is easy to get lost in work, forget about “life” and focus on this future goal instead of living here an now. Looking back, I think we did it all wrong. It took us many months to feel rested and energetic again. But I am happy that we finally left and forgot all the lists with unfinished tasks, at least for a while.

I am not going to write the whole lot here. This photo was taken the next day after we had bought our bus. It was a spontaneous purchase. We were looking for a Merceds 508D for a while, but there were only a few of these buses for sale in the whole Sweden. Most of them were in a very poor condition. We got a tip from a friend that this bus was for sale right on the island where we lived. It meant that we didn’t have to go to the mainland and drive or transport it back to Gotland, which was just perfect.
It was late evening when we met the couple that was selling it, so it was very dark and we couldn’t see much. But we really liked the owners of the bus, so we decided not to return to look at it in daylight but buy and drive it home the very same night. And so a whole year of bus restoration and house renovation, house sale, moving out, building the bus interior and etc began. A couple of months later we quit our jobs and started working full-time on the bus and the house to realize our dream of being free and living on the road.