We present to you Carla and David, the parents of the Ligrons. They love it traveling as a family in your camper van. Together with their son Roberto and daughter Greta, they left Tenerife a year ago by van, only with “one way ticket”. They are brave. They have dared to take a big turn in their life and they do not regret it.
They sold their belongings, left their rental home, and are buying time with their savings. They are looking for delocalized jobs to be able to live where they want for as long as they want. They live on the move. Its magic formula: family, satisfaction, work and enjoyment. All together. Right now, the family is in Lleida completing a project and very soon they will leave for Granada, where they are organizing a gathering of worldschooler families.
How did you start your adventure?
Our children's education was the last piece of the puzzle. In Tenerife they went to a free school. This type of education / parenting makes you look deep inside. You offer your children something that is different from what we grew up with, so to be able to give it requires learning or rather, unlearning for the adult. It led us to this inner search for what we want to do, how and where. We wanted the same thing that we were offering our children and that was time. All this added to the fact that we wanted to leave Tenerife to be able to move more freely with the van.
What has happened to your work? Do you telecommute? Do you have a leave of absence?
David was fired a year before leaving. I, Carla, was finishing my doctorate and at that moment we agreed that he would not look for a job so that I could get a handle on the doctorate and finish and then ... go traveling on the van while we looked for a school that we liked while reinventing ourselves. That was the initial plan…. Now we are creating delocalized jobs. Last November we launched https://geckocamper.com/, Where David does online electromechanical advice and assists in the search and purchase of vehicles as well as camperizations.
I have several projects in progress. I'm about to open a store in www.madeinthevan.com with @madeinthevan which for now can be followed on Instagram and Facebook. We are not yet economically sustainable, we earn very little. We continue to live on savings, but this is the time we are buying to manufacture the life we want.
Tell us what is being the most difficult part of the trip… the fact of leaving the comfort zone?
The most difficult thing is to cover everyone's needs at all times. We are four and the most important thing for us is that we are all well. Starting from this basic idea of feeling good, the most difficult thing is to organize ourselves to work each of the adults with the children all day. We know how to solve this because we visualize how we want to move: slowly in a van and doing housesitting seasons of at least 3 months and that children Go to alternative schools wherever we are, so we will all have our time and space and we will also cover the demand for pets ..., heh, heh, heh.
All long-term travelers spend the first few months. At first everything is a hurricane, because when you leave your comfort zone without leaving anything to return to and just looking forward, what you find is with you. And almost no one is prepared because we live disconnected from ourselves from birth, busy completing tasks and goals.
How do you manage the family finances and what advice would you give to other families who follow your steps?
When we left we had limited savings. We calculate that they would give us for more than a year and a half without entering anything and leaving a backup to start from scratch elsewhere. We have realized that we already lived without spending too much when we lived in a house with a common routine because now we have almost the same expenses. We need an average of € 1.000 per month and I assure you that it is very tight.
With that budget, you have to forget about living as tourists ...
Effectively. When we move, we are not tourists who visit everything that is payable, nor do they buy souvenirs, clothing, etc., unless we need something. In addition, in the van! It does not fit us !!.
To this day we continue with savings, although the vision has changed. We have invested the backup in the project that David is doing, which you can follow in @camperizatufvan, Instagram and Facebook. We hope to recover it by the end of the year and continue our private journey. Just like my projects. We hope they see the light at the beginning of the year.
Find out what is your monthly expense currently in a normal life with home, school, routines, activities, etc? Here you must include rent, mortgage, food, internet, telephones, fixed expenses, etc.
If you stopped entering today, how long could you live with the level you live now?
Predict what your trip is, make a budget of what it would cost you and see if you can take it and for how long.
Don't forget annual expenses like health insurance, car insurance and itv. Also include the cost of flights, visas, take into account tolls ...
Investigate workaway platforms if you want to work on the road.
Homexchange type platforms, if you have a house and thus be able to exchange it. And the well-known Couchsurfing, not only to stay but for local people to guide you or tell you where to go in each place.
If you take a long family trip, the community is important, so contacting other families can be useful, both for children and adults. If not, in the end you are traveling and raising alone, and that is very difficult.
Let's take a look back, how was your first trip in a camper or motorhome?
My parents had a vw T2. And in the case of David, his parents had a caravan where he traveled with his 3 siblings, his parents and a dog named Troika. As adults as a couple we bought our first van in 2010, a vw T4. Although the previous year we did a trip in the AC of David's parents.
A special town for you ...
Torla and the Ordesa mountains. We can go back a thousand times that we don't get tired.
If you went to X Factor, what song would you sing?
I've never seen the show, but I could sing any tune-up song hahaha.
Your best traveling anecdote ...
On the second trip with the T4 to the peninsula, with Roberto at 4 months. We threw a lamppost of a camping site reversing with the van !! What a scare. We were told that it was not the first time. Uff ... insurance covered it.
What camper van do you have now? Its two best features?
Now we have a Mercedes Sprinter L2H2, the Ligroneta. It is small enough to fit almost anywhere and large enough to cope well. It has rear-wheel drive and is a little higher than the other vans of these measures, which allows us better access to the places we like.
If you could invent the camper or motorhome 10 of the future, what would it look like?
It could still be the one we have now. Really. I would only design it with more space if it could be compressed whenever I wanted. I would add a bath that would disappear when not in use. Yes Yes.
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