We decided to travel in a van we modified, we speak about the modification and the day life inside while traveling.
We have now finished insulating the back of the van and we’re starting the biggest part of the job, the part that is actually visible! The front of the van will be done a little later. The complexities of the shapes and the different curves are pushing us to go where we can make the most progress. We’re now at the stage where there is no going back: the walls. At the very beginning of …
On this 8th day of working on the Snail, we are still making progress on the insulation. As we said before, we put fibreglass insulation on the floor and roof, and we covered it all with a vapour barrier in order to keep out the humidity. It was the first time that we had ever installed this type of material. It’s not the easiest stuff to work with, especially when you’re installing it in a …
The advantage of doing a project like this, whether it’s Audrey or me, is that we are complete novices at it and we learn something new every step of the way. So, now we know: if you insulate, it’s important to protect the insulation from humidity. This is done with a vapour barrier. It could be paper or plastic on the one side, but the other side will always be aluminum. The vapour barrier serves …
We had visions of sun, palm trees, beaches, etc., at least that was our aim. Most of the time we would be able to say that sleeping under the stars in a place like this was idyllic. Imagining living in the van over the long term, you can imagine that we would sometimes have to actually be INSIDE the van at some inopportune moments. The sun can be a real scourge inside a metal box. …
Now that we’ve managed to take care of the rust inside the Snail, we need to make sure it doesn’t come back. Audrey had some antirust paint left over from another project, so we decided to use it to cover the inside of the van. The project in question wasn’t a big one, so there were a lot of colours left over. In a little while, we had a motley hippie van, decked out in …
In order to get off to a good start on the transformation of the van, we had to start by deep cleaning it. To tell you the truth, we never thought we would go as far as we did, but it had to be done. We could only see the van’s true state after completely stripping it. Our starting point was a simple piece of plywood screwed to the floor. Not too difficult to take …
The idea behind buying a van for the trip rather than hitchhiking or depending on public transport or bicycles is that we could make it into our new (temporary) home, one that we can take with us. Another reason is because there are certain things that we wanted to take with us, and carrying them in a backpack would have been difficult. As well, after a lot of reading and discussion, we agreed that we …
When leaving on a big trip, the choice of a vehicle is of utmost importance and that was our starting point. After looking at a few vehicles, we realized that we needed a fair bit of space, given the fact that our trek would be a long-term one. After visiting dealerships, we wanted to find a vehicle tall enough for us to stand up inside of it. As you can imagine, when the weather is …
