It is 4,000km from Point V to Point A from Christian Morrison + Julie Gibb on Vimeo.

The thing about living the van life is that you can change direction at any time. For any reason. This is one benefit of not being tied to one place. You can adapt, respond, accommodate to changing circumstances. We needed and were able to return to Ontario for all of these reasons. So here we are in Amherstburg, Ontario for an unknown amount of time. We had originally hoped to drive south from British Columbia lingering in Washington, Oregon and northern California exploring these states that we have always wanted to visit. That will have to wait and that is okay.

Van Morrison and Gibb has never to the best of our knowledge spent time in winter. It was never our plan to expose the van to the assaults of winter. The van was put to the test and came through heavily covered in snirt (snow/dirt) and in need of some expensive repair work which in hindsight we should have had done before we left Victoria. We made it though! And what a journey it was! It was thrilling to drive through Washington, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota in winter. The landscape was breathtaking and the driving at times a bit stressful. There were several mountain passes, heavy snow and slippery road conditions and periodically poor visibility. And then there were the evolving disconcerting sounds emerging from different parts of the van. We had always wanted to see Mount Rushmore and Badlands National Park in South Dakota and couldn’t think of a better time to see these landmarks than in off-season. It was, of course, in the Badlands, that the van began to worry us and we wondered aloud if we would make it out of this remote landscape. We did! The van though continued to be more difficult to handle on the road. We kept willing Van M&G to make it to the next city or town in hopes of finding a VW mechanic that could help. We made all the way, somehow, to the outskirts of Chicago. The only thing we would have preferred was to camp but alas being winter and off-season all the parks and campgrounds east of Seattle were closed. We could envision the camping would have been spectacular!

In the words of David Bowie, ‘we don’t know what’s next but it won’t be boring!’