Trailing Ivy
Hello.
Join us as we share honest tales and images of our travels through Africa (for now) with Ivy the Iveco – a 32-year-old 4x4 ex-Belgian military police truck that’s currently our home.
Spending more than four years in a campervan in Latin America should have been enough to convince us that it’s actually just more straightforward and sensible to stay still and live in a house. But it wasn’t. We were infected with the bug and couldn’t shake it off. So here we are again. Different camper, different continents, a decade older and not much wiser.
Living on the road is fun, stimulating, joyous, varied, sometimes stressful and often a bit weird. We’re happy people when exploring new places with our own little home. It’s a simpler life in myriad ways, but it’s not always easy. Sometimes the tasks, decision-making and problems can feel overwhelming. We seem to be addicted to the highs, lows and strangeness that this life brings with it. We’ll show you the lovely bits, the quirky bits and the rubbish bits because, to us, they are equally important parts of the experience.
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Who are we?
We’re Paula and Jeremy. Fifty-something Brits who now also have Belgian nationality (Brexit schmexit). We left London in 2011 and travelled through Latin America in a frequently-broken VW camper for nearly five years.
Then Jeremy got a job with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in Brussels and we moved there, staying in Belgium for seven years. Brexit happened – aaaargh! – but we were lucky to be able to build up enough years to qualify for Belgian citizenship. Our base remains in Belgium. We’re still freelancing part-time on the road. We’re both journalists with other related strings to our bows. Jeremy’s doing project work for the IFJ and I’m writing the members’ magazine for the UK civil service trade union, PCS.
We’re okay with words, logistics, planning and problem-solving. To say we’re not really okay with mechanical stuff might be the understatement of the century. But we try not to let that get in the way of a good road trip.
The Europe leg
We spent 14 months pottering slowly through France, Spain, Portugal and Italy from June 2023-Sept 2024. Our pics from that leg were shared on Instagram @trailing_ivy_
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