Radius & Ulna

Our journey started a year ago, when Simon and I decided to change our lives completely.

Last June, we were two cooking students, working all day in restaurants and trying to make a career together.

it took some time for us to realize we were not truly happy, even if we loved each other. It wasn’t enough.

We were passionate about food but wanted to learn about it differently, away from restaurants and closer to nature.

All his life, Simon wanted to travel and discover the world. He is a true wanderer, always amazed and ready to explore.

Me ? I needed to leave, have some fresh air and take some risks with my life.

Together, we decided it was time to elope.

A lot of thinking and excitement after, our project was clear : we wanted to discover all our European countries and learn more about their cultures and gastronomies.

But how ? By foot felt too risky and extreme. We discovered the Vanlife community. Here was our answer.

As we are not only cooks but designers, the idea of building our own home was too tempting. We graduated, left our jobs and signed up for driving lessons.

It took us a few months to get our driving license, to build our van and make it a home, a travel companion named Anatoli.

The conversion only was already an adventure. We learned a lot about each other, about how to work and evolve as a team to build great things.

And now we are on the road, we are an even better team.

As I’m telling you our story, we’ve been on the road for only 4 months. I feel like we’ve been out there for years.

We’ve traveled through Spain, Portugal and a part of England.

In more than 6000 miles, we hiked in foggy forests and wild deserts. We dived in the Mediterranean sea, admired Atlantic waves and washed ourselves in rivers.

We shared drinks and dizziness with Portuguese, Australians or Danish.

We felt miserable when our engine broke down, and invincible when we fixed our injection pump by ourselves.

As we wished, our cooking changed along with the landscapes and we reinvented our jobs completely.

Our tiny van kitchen is not a restraint but a real source of creativity. We’ve never been as inventive as we are today. We create better and healthier recipes, as the van life taught us that every meal is precious and matters. It also taught us how to get by from way less tools and ressources.

We reached a point when we dream about making a living out of our nomadic cooking one day.

But the great landscapes we witness and the great food we create are not the main reason we are hooked on the van life.

The most important thing is that each day we feel like growing into better human beings, better partners to each other ( not always easy in 4 square meters ! )

Living in a van teaches us to be respectful to our environment, to live way more with way less, to be optimistic towards the future.

We let go of our fears little by little, but allow ourselves to be fragile too, because it is not always an easy adventure.

Finally, I guess the van life daily reminds us to be grateful for how lucky we are to live that way. We are grateful for this home that still rolls, for the nature welcoming us on its ground and all the little things that turn this road trip into a life changing journey.

Follow along their epic adventures on Instagram @radiusandulna