CANADA III: MY VAN LIFE
- coupkovasvatava
- May 13, 2018
- 3 min read
In Canada I have a car. Well, I had a car in New Zealand as well but the car I have in Canada is different. First it is really big. It has seven seats that we folded under the floor straight away (right, there is space IN the floor where the seats disappear completely when you don't need them) and since then I haven't seen them. It has a good reason.
Because second: my car is equipped with all the stuff you may possible need for camping. There is a good mattress that sleeps two people comfortably (mum says I am only a half person but sometimes I take up a lot of space), a stove and a big gas bottle that we use for cooking, a chilli bin where we store all our food, a paper box with my clothes and then a lot of bits a pieces. When we started camping it was pretty cold (and since then it was cold again and it might be cold in Alaska later on) so I was glad we got really warm sleeping bags. Now it is hot and I am hot and I don't like the bag anymore. Mum says I can use it like a blanket but I don't want to be using it at all. She doesn't get it and keeps covering me whenever I set my legs free but I insist. Then sometimes I have cold feet in the morning :-(. We cook every day. Actually we cook twice a day. In the morning we have oats with fruit and then in the evening we make dinner. (There is usually a sandwich for lunch since very often we are at a nice lake or on the top of a mountain at that time of day.) At the beginning there was meat every day but it is not anymore. I think it has something to do with the rising temperature and the absence of a real fridge in our car. So unless we go shopping I become a vegetarian for the day. I like helping with cooking. I know that once you light the stove it gets "paaaliii paaaliii" (hot) and I can't touch it. I know that food in pots is hot as well and I have to do "fuuu fuuu" (blow) on it before I put it into my mouth. Sometimes we stay in campsites where there is no shower and it is awesome because I don't have to take a bath! When there is a shower I have to take it. Always. Mum says that we never know when the next serviced campground comes so we have to take all possible showers.
I go to bed pretty late these days. 8.30 or sometimes even 9. No wonder. It is daylight outside and we have no curtains! But then in the morning I almost always have a nice sleep in. I don't wake up before 7.30, sometimes 8. I think mum likes it. The other day I realized there are a lot of buttons where mum sits and when she doesn't look I crawl in and start pushing and turning them. I especially like the button that turns the light on. I would like to leave them on all night but mum says that if we want to leave again it is not the best idea. We drive every day but so far we have moved very slowly and since we left Calgary put only 2100 km on the odometer that I suspect it is not really enough if we ever want to reach the East coast. When we drive I sit beside mum in my brand new second-hand seat and it is awesome! I can see what's going on around and it's awesome. So much better than sitting in the back! Sometimes I get bored but quite often I just close my eyes and take a short nap. So that's what my life in the van looks like. It is very different from the house life but I think I quite like it. We can move it wherever we like it and if we like it a lot we can stay longer. We also save some money for accommodation so mum can buy me more sweets :-). It is not so nice when it rains though since we have to be inside and that inside is not very spacious. Well, there are two sides to every coin.
Your Annie
