1985 vs 2025 - same, same but different

Celebrating the Van Life Diaries: Europe 1985 podcast series

Let us strap into a time travelling machine rather than a plane or train for a moment: back forty years to 1985.

I was a smiley nine-year-old, and my very forward-thinking parents had found a way to spend six months away from Australia with my sister and I. Long service leave (one of Australia’s best mandated requirements!) meant my Dad could take six months away from his job at the bank but continue to be paid. They’d also been saving up to afford to buy a motorhome or campervan when we landed in London, our home for that time, which they’d sell at the end of the trip. With a physical atlas on her lap, my Mum then navigated us around most of western Europe, spending our days combining our correspondence school homework with sightseeing, making friends in caravan parks, marvelling at the different languages and currencies and habits we came across, and returning to Australia completely changed.

Thanks to fabulous sponsor Context Travel I have been reliving this trip for its 40th anniversary this year. It has been so much fun to read my late Mum’s trip diary, to look at our photo albums, and to record chats with my Dad, and put all this together into six episodes about our special van life experience.

I wanted to compile the whole series here, and if you haven’t listened, bookmark this to enjoy when you can. Lots of links throughout to listen to the episodes in various formats and I hope you enjoy hearing them even a fraction as much as I enjoyed creating them.

Episode 1: Hong Kong, London and Paris

I think my nature is to be a curious person, but I’m sure this trait was enhanced by travelling to new places at this age: old enough to understand the differences, young enough that it felt natural to ask a lot of questions. To this day the thrill of learning about how people live in other places - even small and simple things - has never left me.

My most vivid memories from this section of our trip are spending my ninth birthday at Ocean Park amusement park; the trickiness my Dad found at driving on the opposite side of the road once we got to France; and the experience of spending a morning in a French school in Biarritz - especially strong is the memory of a student giving me a cute eraser as a gift!

Episode 2: Spain, Italy and Greece

The Mediterranean swing of our European adventure came just in time, I think, to help us feel a little bit more “at home”. After about six weeks away, I think we were still having trouble adjusting to this strange new life, and being in Greece in particular, spending time near the coast and with a culture more similar to our own - fairly relaxed, and with people so happy to meet Australians - gave us some nice settling time.

Importantly, we also made very close friends and spent a lot of time travelling with them in Greece and Italy (and later visited them in England) - I’m sure that also helped. Long-term travel has a few challenges and although this timing was pure coincidence, in hindsight I’m sure it helped our whole family really settle into van life.

Episode 3: Switzerland and Austria

Seeing real snow (on the ground - it was summer, and I wouldn’t see snow falling for the first time until I was 25) made our time in Switzerland especially memorable; for my Mum it was the start of a lifelong love of the country. It was also impactful for me to be spending time in German-speaking countries - I had already started learning German in school, and one of my Mum’s best friends was German, and later in life I would move to Germany and work there for a few years because of all this!

My Dad and I had a lot of laughs recording this episode, both about the fun we had playing in the snow, and about our inability to dress appropriately - how Aussie, to keep showing up in shorts and T-shirts when everyone around us has got proper snow gear.

Episode 4: Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands

We were complete pros at campervan/motorhome life by the time we got to Germany, and increasingly my Mum’s diaries immortalised people that we met (usually with the scantest details of their name, hometown and job, but still!). One of the few “planned” stops on our trip happened though - my Dad had a bank colleague who had been transferred to Frankfurt, and we went to visit and stay with their family (on the driveway in our van!) for a few days, even getting our timing right to attend a birthday party of one of the daughters. A little snatch of “normal life” again, which I suspect is important for long-term travellers to have from time to time!

Episode 5: Denmark, Sweden and Norway

Scandinavia, baby!! I feel so grateful that my parents took us all the way into the north of Europe, something that probably felt a bit daunting as we didn’t know much about these countries at all. My vivid memory is being excited to visit the country that Lego came from, since I was not a girl who played with dolls but a girl who loved building with Lego (some things never change, actually!).

Something about the Scandinavian way of life stuck with me, somehow - it led me to a lifelong interest in these countries and to this day I love finding out more about how those communities tick. (The education system particularly interests me as it always sounds like they’ve got theirs a bit more right than we have.) It’s funny what impressions last for decades, isn’t it?

Episode 6: UK, Ireland and Singapore

I actually got so, so sad when I was making this episode, not having realised how much I’d come to enjoy this monthly deep dive into my childhood! Of course, it’s still only eighteen months so my Mum passed away so looking at her trip diary every month has been a special way to remember her, and I have had so much fun chatting with my Dad about the trip in person, too - very special!

This episode is largely about travelling in English-speaking Europe (even if there were some people in Scotland we couldn’t understand!). It was also the first time of many that I’ve understood the effectiveness of having a “home base” for a couple of weeks, rather than moving on a lot during travels, as rented a flat in London for several weeks. And this episode also includes my first visit to Ireland - I only found out much more recently just how Irish-skewed my ancestry is - but I loved it then and absolutely want to return more than I have.

I can’t overstate how life-changing it was for me to take this trip. As an adult, I asked my parents what had given them the idea to even do it, as it was definitely a financial stretch, and not something that anyone else we knew had done. It was my Mum’s idea, it seems, and a key reason is that she had the feeling my sister and I would end up spending significant time abroad in our later lives and she wanted to know what it was like. This is definitely in part a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I wonder if I would have become so attached to travelling life without this kickstart at nine - but either way, I’m immensely glad I had it.