Real experiences, honest advice, and everything we wish we'd known - for anyone who has just bought a campervan or motorhome (or is thinking about it) and isn't entirely sure what they've let themselves in for.

If you're new to campervans or motorhomes and are excited and quietly terrified in roughly equal measure - hello. You're in exactly the right place. We were you, not very long ago.

We're Kate and Charlie. Married, mid-fifties, former café owners in Cornwall. We bought a fifteen-year-old Peugeot Boxer campervan who we named Brigitte. We drove her through France in January through biblical floods and into a snowstorm.

It was the best trip of our lives. Here's what this site is - and why we built it.

What Kettle & Keys Is For

When we started researching the world of campervans, we found two kinds of content. The first was written by people who'd been doing it for years and had maybe forgotten what it felt like not to know anything - technical forums full of jargon, YouTube channels assuming a baseline knowledge we didn't have. The second read like a catalogue.

What we couldn't find was someone like us. A normal couple, real van, real first trip, honest about the things that went wrong and genuinely enthusiastic about the things that went brilliantly. Writing it all down as they went.

So that's what we built.

Kettle & Keys is for anyone who's new to campervans and is Googling things at midnight. The ones who might not know what an EHU adaptor is. The ones who are excited and slightly daunted and aren't sure what to ask. We were those people. We still are, in many ways.

You won't find experts here. You'll find two people who are figuring it out as they go - sharing everything as we’ve learnt it, recommending only the things we’ve genuinely tried and loved, and being completely honest about the things that didn't work out quite as planned. Including the baguette fire.

No question is a silly one here. No experience is too small to be worth having. And you are, we promise, going to be absolutely fine.

Our background

We both have marketing backgrounds then when we moved to Cornwall we ran a mobile coffee van for 3 years and then an award-winning café in Truro, for seven years - early mornings, beautiful food, a community we loved, and the kind of tired that gets into your bones. We sold the café in 2024 and asked ourselves what came next.

Huffle is our gorgeous dog who looks an AI dog. His full name is Hufflepuff - he is a rehomed dog and came to us already named. We are not Harry Potter fans, and this is something we have made a kind of peace with. He is a seven-year-old mix of cocker spaniel, Yorkshire terrier, poodle and shih-Tzu. He is anxious, opinionated, completely beloved, and appears in all of the blog posts.

Brigitte is our van. Fifteen years old, champagne in colour, pulls slightly to the left for reasons three mechanics are baffled. She has a name with a story behind it - involving a wild camp, a hillside near Saint-Tropez, and a woman who spent her whole life loving France. That story has its own blog post, which we hope you enjoy reading. (LINK)

We are not full-time van lifers. We are not twenty-five. We are two people who worked hard, sold something we'd built, and decided that the small pockets of freedom in between the ordinary deserve to be properly, deliberately wonderful.

Come and Find Us

We'd genuinely love to hear from you - especially if you're just starting out, sitting on the fence, or wondering if a fifteen-year-old Peugeot Boxer is really a sensible idea. (It is. Mostly. Do it.)

Tell us about your dreams. Share your hacks. Ask us anything. This is meant to be a conversation, not a broadcast.

And if you'd like our free Van Store Cupboard Guide - the twenty things we never travel without, and what we've made with them at 7pm in a French layby - pop your email in below. No spam. Ever. Just good things, when we have good things to share.

Kate, Charlie, Huffle & Brigitte

Kettle & Keys

comfort, wherever you park up.