Where The Adventure Begins

New Beginnings

Hello, and welcome to our blog Happy Life On Wheels. My name is Reed, and I’m a digital nomad along with my wife Livany and our fluffball Chewie. Together, we have traded in the traditional 9-to-5 lifestyle for a life of adventure on the open road, travelling around Europe and living in our cosy caravan.

A Little About Us

Livany is a Brazilian journalist and singer. She originally came to Spain in mid-2015 just to study marketing and explore a little of Europe. Instead, she met me in Spanish class at the beginning of 2016, and Spain became her home.

I'm an Englishmen that's been living in Spain since 2006, kinda fell into gardening and swimming pool maintenance which turned into a mini business, which last year I completely gave up due to a dodgy back and to begin this new adventure.

Now that's enough about us for now, let's start at the beginning.

Beginnings are hard

Our journey began a few years ago when we both realized that we wanted more out of our lives. We knew we didn't want the traditional lifestyle. We wanted to see more of the world, meet new people, and experience different cultures. We both don't know where we want to settle until we've seen more of the world and seen what’s out there. So we decided to take the leap and pursue our dream of becoming digital nomads.

It would have been nice to say that we just sold our possessions, bought a caravan, and hit the road with Chewie by our side. But things don't always go according to plan, however, and sometimes things take a little longer to do than you might expect.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

This dream of hitting the road has been in our thoughts for coming up to 5 years now. Instead of just having the dream and doing it, we, like lots of people had the dream and thought it was just that, a dream that one day might come true. After a number of months of not doing much of anything but surviving, we had the conversation that things needed to change. We started looking into how we could make our dream a reality.

The first challenge was me! I had only ever done physical jobs, which isn’t ideal for a nomad lifestyle, and the thought of sitting in front of a computer struck me with fear of a monotonous life. But I was kind of lucky in the sense that Livany had already set up her own website & branding consultancy, LasIdeasMKT.com which turned out to be far more interesting than I had ever thought, and when COVID struck, it gave me the opportunity to really study and learn her trade.

Our next decision was how we were actually going to ‘live on wheels’. We know lots of digital nomads that live their nomad lifestyles from a van, but they are also a few years younger than us, and we really wanted some home comforts like a shower, for example. So we knew it had to be some kind of motorhome-type vehicle. But a critical decision we had to make was what kind of motorhome-type vehicle. Do we choose a camper van, a motorhome, or a caravan? Now, this decision took us some time to overcome, and we'll probably create another blog post on the subject in the near future as the camper van vs motorhome vs caravan debate is one that continues to rage on. We eventually settled on a caravan due to the extra space and what our budget would allow.

Now you might think that we have the nomad jobs, we have a nomad vehicle so we should be well on the road to living our nomad life. Well, we have currently gotten as far as a friend's garden, where we've been staying since November 2022 while we've been organising the sale of our family home in Valencia, Spain, as well as some minor and some not-so-minor hiccups. But we are now nearly prepared to begin our travels full-time. 

*edit*

Now we are staying at another friend's house while our caravan's electrics are being renewed due to the previous owner thinking they were electricians but instead turning the caravan into an inferno waiting to happen.

But at least when we get the caravan back, our adventures can begin.

*end of edit*

The Adventures Of Chewie

Our 5 year old Pomeranian, Chewie, will be our constant fluff-ball companion; he loves to explore and is always up for making new friends wherever we go. He is the best travel buddy anyone could ask for. He'll be heavily mentioned in this blog and on our social medias because we couldn't imagine going on this journey without him.

Eco-Living

During our adventures, we are planning to be as eco-friendly as possible, using solar energy and being mindful of our water usage...etc. We believe that by travelling in this way, we can reduce our impact on the environment and preserve as much as possible the natural beauty of the places we visit.

Of course, the only current downside to this is the car we use for towing. Eventually, we would love to go all electric with that, but at the moment, it's just not viable. Unless anyone has any nice alternatives we could test?

As we are planning on trying to live as off-grid as possible, we have got a solar generator as our main source of power which we'll tell you about in another post

In Summery

On our blog, we will be sharing our adventures, stories, and tips with you. We will be sharing our experiences of different places, the people we meet, and the things we learn. We will also be sharing our tips on how to live a nomadic lifestyle, and how to work remotely. We hope that our stories will inspire you to pursue your own travel dreams and to live a life of adventure.

This should show the caravan and pet-friendly places that we have personally been to. Obviously, new places will be added regularly as we continue our adventure. - It’s a little empty at the moment; we’ll update it soon.

This map is for your recommendations. Tell us about your favorite places, places that welcome caravans, and places that are happy to have our pets.