How did it start?
The decision was made the 1st of January: we’ll get a van, and travel south, discovering interesting people doing interesting things. In the back of my mind, I am thinking that want to find out if southern Italy could be a liveable place for me, a good compromise between distance from family and warmer climate. It seems that bananas can grow in Sicily?!? Let’s go find out!
We were hoping to leave beginning of February. Searching for the van was more overwhelming than we expected, especially since none of us knew nothing at all about motors or even models or what we wanted or other useful things to know when buying a house on wheels.
In the end, we got a Peugeot J5, the same as Fiat Ducato, from 1989. As to be expected when buying an old vehicle like that, there were a couple of things to fix. The van seems to be magical: as soon as you fix something, you discover that something else has broken too. If you drop a screw, it gets swallowed. And if you open something to fix it, don’t expect that when you put it back together the parts will fit like before!
So the beginnings were a bit winding. There was not a day zero. We were packed and more or less ready to go, but we stayed one more week around Turin to fix a few more things, say some goodbyes and wait for our friend Freedda that was coming with us to Erli, our first stop.
Our van in the nave backyard