Home is where we park it

A follower asked about our camping lifestyle recently. It is a reasonable question, and the answer is longer than it might appear.

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Where It Begins

We were campers long before we were permanent campers. Years ago, before life took a different turn, my husband and I were avid campers — the kind who knew which campsite had the best ablutions and could pack a tent in the dark.

Then we bought a small farm.

Farm life is beautiful and it is relentless in equal measure. Animals do not care that you need a holiday. The fence does not fix itself because you are tired. And in South Africa, leaving a farm unattended is not something you do lightly. For the years we were on the farm, camping was a memory. Holidays were something other people took.

We sold the farm towards the end of 2021.

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The In-Between Years

What followed was three years of trying to fit back into conventional life, and finding that the fit was no longer quite right.

We moved first to Hartbeespoort — the only rental property available was in a security estate. For two people who had lived with open land around them, it was an adjustment. For our two dogs, it was worse. We lasted a year.

Then Centurion. A standalone house with a bigger yard. Better, but not enough. We survived for two years. Survived is the right word. We felt closed in in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who has not felt it. The walls were perfectly good walls. The neighbourhood was perfectly fine. We were not perfectly fine.

We took vacations when we could. They helped. They also made going back harder.

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The Caravan

In February 2024, we bought our caravan.

We used it twice that year. The first trip was in April — a vacation to Strandfontein on the West Coast. Somewhere between the Atlantic and the fynbos, the conversation started. What if this was not just for holidays?

We had two dogs still. A Boerboel and a rescue that had Gold Retriever in her, along with a lot of other genes. You do not make major life decisions when you have dogs — you wait, and you love them well, and you plan quietly in the background.

In November 2024 we took a month-long test run. We loaded the caravan, drove away from the house, and worked remotely from a bushveld campsite for thirty days. We needed to know if this was a romantic idea or an actual life.

It was an actual life. It was, if anything, better than we had imagined.

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January 2025

We packed up the house and moved everything into storage.

I will not pretend that was a simple sentence to live through. Years of accumulated life, reduced to what fits in a storage unit. But there is a particular lightness on the other side of that kind of decision — the lightness of having chosen something deliberately, even when it is uncomfortable.

February and March we rented a small cottage on a friend’s farm — a gentle transition between the old life and the new one. In April we flew to New Zealand to visit our children. We came back in May, collected the caravan, and on 14 May 2025 we drove away.

We have not driven back.

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What the Life Actually Looks Like

We stay in one place for three months at a time. The current address is wherever we are parked, which has so far included places of considerable beauty.

Monday to Friday we work normal hours — 08:00 to 17:00. We are both in IT and we work remotely. Whether the office is a house in Centurion or a caravan in the Western Cape with a view of rolling hills, the work is identical. The quality of the day around the work is not.

The mornings are the thing I want to tell people about.

We get up at 07:00. We shower, make coffee, and we go outside. We sit and we listen to the birds. I knit a few rows before the day begins. This is not a productivity hack. It is not a wellness routine. It is simply the best part of the day, and we protect it accordingly.

After work, we go outside again. We sit and we look at whatever there is to look at — a field, a mountain, a river, a sky doing something extraordinary with the light. We listen to the animals around us. We do not scroll. We do not hurry.

Saturdays we explore. Old mountain passes. Farm stalls. Restaurants tucked away on dirt roads that do not appear on any list. We love the South Africa that exists between the obvious places — the hidden, unhurried, surprising South Africa.

Sundays we rest. Fully and without guilt.

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The Vehicle and the Caravan

We tow a Jurgens Exclusive with a double tent. It is pulled by a 2002 Toyota Land Cruiser Series 100 that has earned every kilometer it has travelled.

The Cruiser has a name: The Boerboel.

Named in memory of Remus — our last dog, a pitch black Boerboel who was, in every sense of the word, irreplaceable. He is gone now, but he travels with us in the name of the vehicle that takes us everywhere. It felt like the right thing.

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The One Thing We Are Still Waiting For

We are dependent on connectivity. Two people in IT, working remotely, cannot operate without a reliable internet connection — and reliable internet is not available everywhere in South Africa.

For now, that limits us. There are places we cannot stay, not because they are not beautiful, but because the signal is not sufficient. We plan our routes with this in mind.

Starlink is not yet legal for mobile use in South Africa. When it is — and I remain cautiously optimistic that one day it will be — the map opens up entirely. Every remote pass, every farm dam, every place that currently sits just out of reach becomes possible.

Until then, we work with what we have, which is still considerably more than we had in Centurion.

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Why We Did It

Someone will always ask this question, and the answer is simple enough that it almost sounds insufficient.

We were not living. We were existing. We were getting through days in comfortable, perfectly adequate surroundings, waiting for the weekend, waiting for the next vacation, waiting to feel like ourselves again.

The caravan was not an escape. It was a return.

We came back to mornings with birds and coffee. To evenings where the light does something worth watching. To the rhythm of a day that has actual texture to it. To a life that feels, on most days, genuinely like ours.

It is not for everyone. It requires a particular tolerance for uncertainty, for small spaces, for the kind of problem-solving that arises when you live outdoors in South Africa in all its weather.

But for us — for two people who once had a farm and many animals, and then spent a year in a security estate, and two years in the city, trying to remember who they were — it is exactly right.

The Boerboel is parked. The coffee is on. The birds are doing what they do.

We are home.

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If you have questions about permanent camp life, the caravan, the routes, the logistics — ask them in the comments. I will answer what I can, which is quite a lot at this point.

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Come Along for the Ride

If you would like to follow the journey beyond this blog, we document our travels on Find Penguins — the passes we drive, the farm stalls we discover, the sunsets we refuse to stop photographing. It is a running record of where The Boerboel has taken us and what we found when we got there. You are welcome to follow along: findpenguins.com/4ouv1xwlzgveo