You can tell a good deal about a campsite by how long it takes for somebody to lend you something.
We were on the Turkish coast in February, parked on gravel that had been orange dust in October and was now a shallow lake in three places. A German couple two vans along had a spare length of hose. An Australian pair, who had been there since November, had the clip to go on the end of it, and knew which of the taps still ran properly when the pressure dropped in the mornings. Within an hour we had a working water line, an invitation to eat that evening, and a fairly detailed briefing on the road south.
Nobody had asked anybody’s last name.
That is the part that takes some getting used to. In the life we left behind, friendship was built slowly and on top of a good deal of scaffolding: where you live, what you do, whose kids went to which school, how many years you have known each other. Out here almost all of that scaffolding is missing, and the friendships form anyway — quickly, and with a solidity that surprised us both.
That gravel was near Antalya, and it would be easy to read what follows as a story about one good campsite. It is not. The people in this post were met here and there, over years and across a great deal of map — a muddy field in France, a blizzard in Konya, a supermarket parking lot in Bulgaria, a driveway in England. Very few of them have ever been in the same place at the same time.
That is the part we did not expect. What we found is not a location. It is an idea about how to live, held by people who are otherwise nothing like each other, and it surfaces wherever two or three of them end up parked within speaking distance.
We have been trying to work out why it holds. This is our best attempt at an answer, and it comes with names attached, because the people are the whole point.
Nobody asks what you do
The first question on a site is almost never what do you do. It is where have you come from, and the second is where are you going next. Both are practical questions — road conditions, weather, whether the ferry is running, whether the water at the last place was drinkable — but they do something else as well. They place you in time rather than in a hierarchy.
A retired schoolteacher from Yorkshire and a former marine engineer from Singapore have very little obvious to say to one another across a dinner table. Parked side by side, with a shared interest in whether the coast road is passable after rain, they can talk for three hours without noticing.
We learned people’s occupations late, if at all, and usually by accident. The German couple turned out to have run a pharmacy for thirty years. We found out while we were sitting outside in our chairs, talking, watching the sun go down over the Mediterranean. Diane mentioned she had a sore throat, and was handed something that worked, along with instructions delivered in the particular tone of a professional who has said the same sentence ten thousand times.
If you are wondering how to begin a conversation on a site where you know nobody: ask about the road. Never about the person. The road is a real question, it costs the other party nothing to answer, and it hands them the pleasure of being useful. Everything else follows from that, in its own time or not at all.
The one thing everybody has in common
Our friends from this life are, on paper, an unlikely group.
Malvan and Scarlett flew from Singapore to Europe and bought a van sight unseen. Not a van they had looked over and slept a night in and thought about for a week — a van they had seen in photographs, from the other side of the world, and committed to before they landed. They have been living in it for four years. When they tell that story they tell it flatly, the way you would describe changing a bank account, and it is only afterward that you realize how much nerve it took.
There are Australians who sold a house and put the proceeds into a van and a great deal of time. There are Germans who have been doing three months out and nine months at home for the better part of a decade, and who are more organized than the rest of us put together. There are several British couples, one of whom we would probably disagree with about almost every subject in the news, and who once spent an entire afternoon helping us get new tires fitted without any of it coming up.
What they share is not age, income, politics, religion or taste. What they share is a decision.
Every one of them had, at some point, sat at a kitchen table and worked out that they would rather have less space and more time. They had all made the same arithmetic come out the same way. They had all then had the conversation with grown children, or a sister, or an accountant, in which the plan was described back to them in a slightly worried voice. They had all sold or stored more possessions than they expected to, and been surprised by how little they missed them.
That decision is unusual enough, and costs enough, that meeting somebody else who has made it feels less like meeting a stranger and more like meeting somebody from your own hometown. You skip several stages. You are not starting from nothing; you are starting from the one thing that actually reshaped both of your lives.
It is not a shared destination — almost nobody out here is trying to get anywhere in particular. It is a shared rate. Everyone has quietly agreed to go slowly, and that turns out to be a stronger basis for friendship than most of the things we used to build them on.
It is also why we have stopped describing this as a place. There is no capital city for it. The gravel in Turkey, the field in France, the driveway in England — none of those is the community. They are where it happened to surface that week. What travels is the mindset: the open calendar, the offer made once and then let go, the working assumption that the stranger two vans over is about to be useful to you and would like the chance. Carry that and you are in it, whether you are five thousand miles from home or parked forty minutes from where you grew up.
The other Americans out here
Something we did not anticipate: we are uncommon. The people we travel among are overwhelmingly British, German, Dutch and Australian. There are other Americans out here, and we have met a fair few of them by now, with more arriving every season — but two Americans in a van in Europe still get asked twice, and for a long stretch early on we did not meet another pair doing what we were doing.
Then Curt and Snow.
They understand us on a level the others cannot quite reach, and it has nothing to do with patriotism. It is the small stuff. The shape of the life we all left. What it costs to be nine time zones from a family emergency. The particular strangeness of being asked, politely and often, to explain your own country to people who follow its news more closely than you do.
Years ago, in another life back in the States, we almost certainly crossed paths with them in Cedar Key, Florida — a town small enough that it is hard to believe the four of us never stood in the same store on the same afternoon. We would not have recognized each other. We had no reason to. Nothing about us then would have suggested we had anything in common, because we did not yet.
Instead we met out there, somewhere: a muddy field in France, a Christmas at an agriturismo in Italy. That is how it goes. The connection was not waiting for us at home. It had to be built somewhere neither of us belonged.
They also happen to be, in the language of the internet, big-name YouTube stars. We are aware of this the way you are aware of any fact about a friend that has nothing to do with you. To us they are another couple we keep running into — in Scotland, in Turkey, in Albania — who will lend you a socket set and tell you the truth about a road.
It takes a commitment to get there
We have met more lasting friends in Turkey than anywhere else, and it is worth being precise about why, because it is not simply that Turkey is warm and inexpensive.
It takes a commitment to reach some of the places in Turkey where we have met people. Konya in the snow. Gaziantep in the rain. These are not the easy coastal stops with a bakery and a beach and a hundred other vans. They are long drives inland, in weather, on days when the sensible plan is to keep heading south. Everybody you find parked in a place like that has made the same effort to be there, and has made it deliberately, and that does a certain amount of sorting before anybody speaks.
John and Kellie are Australians. We met them in a blizzard in Konya, which is not a sentence either of us expected to write. Then Antalya. Then Bulgaria. Then, improbably, Scotland. Four countries and no plan at any point to be in the same one, and by the third time it had stopped feeling like a coincidence and started feeling like a standing arrangement neither party had made.
There is a longer history sitting behind the way travelers are treated in this part of the world, and it is hard to ignore when you are driving through it. The stone caravanserais on the old roads around Konya were built for exactly this — people arriving cold, at the wrong time of year, needing somewhere to put themselves and their animals. By tradition a traveler was housed and fed there for up to three days without payment. Hospitality here is not a recent invention of the tourism industry. It is a habit with very deep roots, and you feel it in small ways: the extra glass of tea that arrives without being ordered, the shopkeeper who walks you around the corner to the store that actually sells the thing you asked for.
If you take one practical thing from this piece, take this: stop booking ahead. Leave the calendar completely empty past the place you are in. Almost every friendship in this post exists because we were able to say we’ll stay another week on a Tuesday afternoon, without a reservation two hundred miles away pulling us off the site. A month is roughly the point at which people stop being polite to you and start being pleased to see you, and you will never reach it if you are traveling on a schedule you set at home in January.
The currency is usefulness
In a house, you show affection by inviting people over. Out here, you show it by being useful, and the exchange rate is generous. A ride into town. A socket set. A morning spent lying on cold gravel under somebody else’s van looking at a leak that is not your problem. Knowing which garage in the next town will look at an engine on a Saturday, and being willing to make the call yourself because your Turkish is marginally better than theirs.
There is an etiquette to it that took us a while to read. You offer once, clearly, and then you go away. Hovering is the one real sin. If the offer is wanted it will be taken up within the hour, and if it is not, nothing is said about it by either party, ever.
Nobody keeps score, which is the part that took longest to believe. We spent our first year quietly trying to balance the books — returning favors, buying dinners, feeling faintly indebted — before we understood that this made us hard work. The help is not a loan. It goes around, and eventually it comes back, and the only real obligation is to pass it on to the next person who arrives looking slightly lost with a hose in one hand.
Here is where we got it wrong, and it is worth admitting. We were fitting an in-dash satnav unit, and the unit was never the problem. The wiring was. There is no obvious route for a cable behind a modern dashboard, and every path we tried either came up short or meant taking apart something we did not want to take apart. We spent the better part of two days on it, quietly, because we wanted to be the couple who could do this themselves. Then Curt had a look, and was quick to point out how to make it work.
Friendship that does not need continuity
The second unusual thing about these friendships is that they survive without maintenance.
Departures happen early and without ceremony. Somebody’s window is open at six thirty, the step is in, and by the time you have the kettle on there is a rectangle of dry gravel where they were. There is usually a message later in the day with a photograph of somewhere two hundred miles further on.
Then months pass. Sometimes years. Nobody calls on birthdays. Nobody is offended by the silence, because the silence does not mean anything — everybody understands that the other party is busy with weather, water, and a laundry run that has eaten another afternoon.
And then you pull into a supermarket parking lot in a different country entirely and there is a van you recognize before you recognize the people, and you pick the conversation up in the middle of the sentence where it was left. Not politely. Actually. It is one of the real pleasures of this life, and it is not one we anticipated.
Jo and Dee are the clearest example we have. We first met them in Selçuk. Since then we have seen them in England, in Kuala Lumpur, on Koh Samui in Thailand, and on the coast of Albania. Not one of those meetings was the natural consequence of the one before it. There is no logic to the map. There is only the fact that when two couples both have an open calendar and a habit of saying yes, the world turns out to be a good deal smaller than it looks.
Between all of them we have crossed paths, traveled together, said joyful hellos and tearful goodbyes. We have lost touch with some. With others we are on WhatsApp daily — the small traffic of people who know what your week actually looks like, which is mostly weather, water and a plan that changed on Wednesday.
A small piece of practical advice that we learned the slow way: exchange numbers on the first evening, not on the last. The last evening is always busier than you expect, somebody is packing, and it is very easy to lose people entirely to good intentions. We have lost people that way and still think about it.
The ones who keep our mail
Not all of it happens on the road. Some of the people we are closest to we met in England, which is a stranger experience for two Americans than it sounds. The language is shared and almost nothing else is. You are not a local and you are not quite a foreigner either, and people are kind to you in a way that assumes you already know how everything works, which you do not.
Mel and Becky are English, and they are our home away from home. That is not a figure of speech. Our packages go to their address. When you live in a van, the ordinary business of receiving a spare part, a replacement bank card or a birthday present becomes surprisingly complicated, and the people who solve it for you are doing something more substantial than a favor. They are giving you a fixed point.
They live in an enormous Mercedes Vario, fitted out inside to look like the interior of a boat, which sounds like a novelty until you are standing in it and can see how carefully it has been thought through. They rarely leave the UK, which is beside the point. What holds this group together is a mindset rather than a mileage count, and Mel and Becky have the same one we found in a Turkish field. If you want to see what a considered conversion actually looks like, Mel films theirs at Mel’s Big Van Small World and Becky at Sacred Traveller.
We arrive, we unpack a small pile of accumulated mail on their table, and we stay a few days, and the conversation is the one you have with people who have known you long enough not to need the news first. Everybody who lives this way needs an address that belongs to a person rather than a company. If you are planning this life, that is worth arranging early, and worth being properly grateful for.
The parts nobody photographs
It would be dishonest to leave it there, because a winter site is a small village for a few months, and small villages have small-village problems.
You do not like everybody, and everybody does not like you. There is always at least one person who will tell you about their solar installation for fifty minutes with no natural exit. There is occasionally a couple going through something difficult, and van walls are thin, and the kindest thing you can do is take a long walk and say nothing about it afterward. Groups form and, very occasionally, close.
And then there is the harder one. People stop. A knee gives out, or a parent needs looking after, or the numbers stop working, and a couple you had assumed would always be somewhere on the map goes home and does not come back out. There is a particular quietness to that which we were not ready for the first time. Diane keeps a list of everyone we have traveled alongside, and it is a comfort and an ache in roughly equal measure.
We mention it because the reassurance in this piece would be worth less without it. The friendships are real, and they are also weather-dependent and finite, and knowing that is part of what makes people so quick to be kind to one another out here.
What we would do differently
We would say yes earlier. Our first year was spent politely declining invitations on the assumption that we were intruding on established groups, when in fact almost every group on a winter site was itself only six weeks old. Nobody was established. We simply arrived late in our own heads.
We would cook for people sooner. It is the cheapest way to be useful, it requires no tools, and a pot of something on a folding table outside has started more of our friendships than any amount of standing around looking approachable.
We would ask for help before we had earned the right to it in our own minds. The satnav wiring cost us two days and a certain amount of dignity, and the only reason it cost anything at all is that we had decided in advance what kind of couple we wanted to appear to be.
We would engage more often, and sooner. It is worth asking how many friendships we have let go by saying we’ll get their contact information tomorrow, only to find a dry rectangle of gravel where the van had been before we had our coffee. Nobody announces a departure. The window is open at six, the step is in, and by the time you are awake enough to be sociable the chance has driven off toward the coast.
And we would be more careful about traveling in convoy. It sounds appealing and it works for perhaps two weeks, after which two vans that want different things each morning start to grind. The friendships that lasted were the ones where we shared a place rather than a route, and then went our separate ways cheerfully.
Would you be welcome?
This is the question we are asked most often by people thinking about doing this later in life, usually phrased as a worry about being the newcomer at sixty-two.
The honest answer is that it is the easiest social environment either of us has ever entered, and the reason is not that the people are unusually warm. Some are and some are not, in the ordinary proportions. It is that everybody arrived by making the same decision, and that decision is doing most of the work before either of you says a word. You do not have to be interesting. You do not have to be well traveled. You certainly do not have to be competent — arriving slightly out of your depth is close to a credential.
You need to be able to ask about the road, accept a hose clip without embarrassment, and be somewhere long enough for the second conversation to happen.
It is six thirty in the morning as we write this. Somebody two rows over has their window open and their step in, and there will be a rectangle of dry gravel there by the time the kettle boils. We will hear from them by lunchtime, or in eighteen months, in a parking lot in Germany. Both are fine. That is rather the point.
