Budget Travel – Why I Love Road Trips in a Van | Guest Post

Regular readers will know that I love a staycation, and even more so if I can  take my time travelling to my destination. I love a good road trip. The only problem is the costs can soon mount up – from fuel costs, to campsite, and more. So when Kelly got in touch wanting to share her experiences of budget van travel and her recent road trips, I was more than happy to hear from her.

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Hello everyone. My name is Kelly and I run The Kelly Diane Report. I’ve previously run another blog but for various personal reasons, closed it. After a while, I realised that I was missing creating content for a blog so have recently started up my blog again. The idea behind my blog is to give real honest reviews as well as to give my audience an insight into my life. I blog about anything that interests me whether its aviation, beauty, fashion or lifestyle related, anything as long as its relevant to me.

Blog: ywww.thekellydianereport.co.uk, Instagram: www.instagram.com/kellydiane94, Twitter: www.twitter.com/KellyReportBlog

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Budget Travel – Why I Love Road Trips in a Van

Guest post by: Kelly

I love travelling just as much as the next person but have found that the costs can soon mount up, by the time you get fuel and then add hotel rooms, it leaves a lot less money in the pot if you are trying to budget. But just because you are trying to budget, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t travel.

>Myself and my partner Andy have a Vauxhall Vivaro van which we have kitted out inside, so that we can use it to save money and the next for hotels. We have made shelves for storage boxes and other items such as suitcase and camera are stowed out of the way. At night we have a reasonable amount of room to sleep using two sun loungers with inflatable mattresses on the top and a thick duvet means that we can go camping any time of the year. In fact so far this year, we have had a week away in the van both in January and February and not once did I complain that I was cold at night, which is unusual for me!

Its great being able to wake up to birds singing and knowing that we could just drive to somewhere completely new and explore without having to worry about making it in time to check into a hotel room. We are free to do as we please and if we want to spend all day at a particular location, we can.

It’s also great that myself and Andy can get back to basics and just enjoy each others company. Some of my best memories of our trips have been us just giggling away at something really trivial, usually with tears running down my face.

As I love reading, I usually take a book to enjoy and Andy usually watches old comedies on YouTube. We also invested in a leisure battery which we can use to charge camera batteries and phones if we need to. We can also plug our portable DVD player into it and settle down and watch a film.

Overall I absolutely love camping and I know Andy does too. Not only is it a much cheaper way of travelling, but we have also woken up to some of the most beautiful locations I have ever seen. If you are thinking about doing something similar, my advice would be just go for it. Do some research and work out what is important to you.

In hindsight, we could perhaps do with a slightly bigger van because getting changed at night can be difficult if you are tall like Andy. It is the best feeling in the world to just be able to wake up one day and say I feel like travelling and off you go. If you would like to know more about our camping experience or ideas of locations to visit, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions.

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I hope you enjoyed Kelly’s post about budget van travel. Have you ever traveled in a van before? What was your part about it? Let me know in the comments.